Specific Compile Problems

What does undefined reference to 'compress' mean?

In general, it means that it is having trouble finding or linking to the compression library (libz). First, make sure it is installed. If it isn't, then find it and install it. It should be included in all major Unixes and Unix-like systems.

If it is installed properly, and you still get the error, than check to see if there are any other copies of libz floating around. One place where it often is hiding when people have problems is in /usr/X11R6/lib, since XFree86 puts a copy there. It is probably safe to just delete it, but if you aren't sure, rename it to something like libz.so.renamed, that way it won't be found by the linker, and if you run into problems elsewhere because of the renaming, you can just rename it back.

What is AC_TRY_RUN, and why is my machine warning me about it?

Sometimes, when running aclocal, autogen.sh or make, you will get lines looking like: configure.in:171: warning: AC_TRY_RUN called without default to allow cross compiling. This is nothing to be alarmed about, you can safely ignore it (unless you are cross compiling).

If you're still curious, a cross compiler is a compiler based on one platform that you can use to create code to run on a different platform. For example, some people have a version of GCC installed on GNU/Linux boxes with Intel processors which makes binaries for SGI boxes with MIPS processors. This would be a cross compiler.

The AC_TRY_RUN macro is called to attempt to compile and run a code fragment. It is used to test to see whether a particular piece of code is likely to work on your machine or not, and adjust the configuration accordingly. If you are cross-compiling, however, you can't run the code fragment, since it's on a different machine than the one you are on. The AC_TRY_RUN macro includes a parameter to tell it what to do in this case, but we haven't tested cross-compiling GNOME yet, so it would be premature to configure this value. Because the value is absent, it gives the warning.

While compiling the program gnome-gen-mimedb segfaults

This means you have a broken db 1.85 package, please upgrade your db library