terminal server

[yawningdog]

Dell GX620, Slackware 12.

I want to build a terminal server for windows clients. The VNC-based service that slack ships with works briefly but crashes before I can do anything productive on my machine.

I've tried to install xrdp, but it seems that it wont work without PAM. When I try to build pam_userpass-1.0.2 I get the following...

user@computer:/pam_userpass-1.0.2# make
gcc -Wall -O2 -fPIC -Iinclude -c pam_userpass.c
pam_userpass.c:5:34: error: security/pam_modules.h: No such file or directory
pam_userpass.c:6:33: error: security/pam_client.h: No such file or directory
pam_userpass.c:17: error: expected '=', ',', ';', 'asm' or '__attribute__' before 'int'
pam_userpass.c:93: error: expected '=', ',', ';', 'asm' or '__attribute__' before 'int'
make: *** [pam_userpass.o] Error 1

Currently, my question is where are these header files that cannot be found? Are they supposed to be in the pam_userpass directory, or should they be somewhere else in the filesystem? I run into this a lot when compiling from source and I could never understand why developers don't make this easier. I can post relevant chunks of the makefile and source files if you need them.

Thanks in advance.

[yawningdog]

Let's change the question...

As it turns out, xrdp has two dependencies. They are pam-devel, and openssl-devel. I've only been able to find these in RPM format. Can I install RPMs on a Slack machine somehow?

[Freston]

Welcome to the forums!

As it turns out, xrdp has two dependencies. They are pam-devel, and openssl-devel. I've only been able to find these in RPM format. Can I install RPMs on a Slack machine somehow?

Ya sure

rpm away, I'd say. Use the --nodeps flag in necessary. Or.... do as I do, and <rpm2tgz *rpm ; rm *rpm> and installpkg those slick Slackpacks.

[yawningdog]

I finally got it working. Thanks Freston. I used RPM with the --nodeps flag for pam-devel and the rpm2tgz method for openssl-devel and they both worked. I was then able to compile pam-userpass. Then I had to copy the pam.d folder to /etc manually, then copy the example_userpass to pam.d and rename it xrdp.

Now...installing Timberline accounting in WINE.

[bidi]

Well, Slackware really doesn't have any -devel packages, the header files are always shipped with the specific library. I see you already installed the RPMs, but for future reference, you don't want to do that. Slackware already comes with PAM and OpenSSL, so there should be no reason to use other packages. I've learned, after many tries, that Slack sometimes puts includes in non-standard places. For example, I've found headers I needed in /usr/lib/gcc/i486-slackware-linux/4.1.2/include. A good idea is to use "locate" or "find" to find where the header files are in and use the --include-dir or whatever option when running ./configure.

[yawningdog]

This is my main complaint with Linux. I appreciate the input bidi, but this would have been nice to know two weeks ago when I started this project. I don't understand why things like this cannot be standardized within distros and it totally annoys me that developers don't address these kinds of things in the man pages and README files. Installing software in Linux is much more difficult than it needs to be.

In fact, I even sent an email to the developer of pam_userpass asking why his software didn't compile on my system. His response, in part, was...

This is obvious - Slackware does not use PAM, so you do not have the PAM library C header files installed on the system.

[bidi]

This is what the FHS is for! However, there is enough ambiguity in the FHS's docs that allows for this type of thing to happen. Generally, you just learn to live with your distro's quirks. Don't let this bog you down though, it took me a whole day to find where the header files for libffi where when I first built GNUstep (it was under the path I gave on the last post).

[yawningdog]

This is exactly what I'm talking about. What exactly is FHS? I'm beginning to think Linux is some exclusive club that I haven't been invited to join.

[bidi]

The big problem is that a lot of the information is scattered around the net. A lot of people try to create some form of standard and post it online. The FHS is the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and it tries to standardize where things are on the filesystem, but not all distributions follow it and there's somewhat ambiguous. There's also freedesktop.org which tries to standardize the Unix desktop (like Gnome and KDE).

I gotta tell you the truth, it's messy if you really thing about it, but once you know where to look for the information it becomes that much easier. Asking questions here is a good start, but doesn't always guarantee a speedy answer (like in this case).

A good source of info is also tldp.org