Building X11R6.8 in Fedora 15 - Flex not found

[Terry Barnaby]

On 09/26/2011 09:49 PM, Doug Kuvaas wrote:
> I am trying to build an older version of X Server on Fedora 15 to
> allow me to run a legacy application.  Fedora 8, which functions
> correctly for our application, will not install on a new computer for
> some reason, presumably because the new hardware uses UEFI, and Fedora
> 15 does not correctly run the application.
>
> When I try to build X11R6.8 from source, I get the following error
> "ld:  cannot find -lfl".  Doing some digging, I found that this error
> is because the linker cannot find the flex library, however flex is
> installed.  I am running a minimal install of Fedora 15 i686 with the
> dev libraries and tools installed, nothing else.
>
> Kernel Version is 2.6.38.6-26.rc1.fc15.i686.PAE
>
> Does anyone have any ideas on how to clear this error?  All the
> answers I found just said to install flex.
You may have to install the package flex-static to get a static version of
the flex library.

However, I don't think you will have much luck in building all of
X11R6.8 and getting it to work under F15, at least not the XServer.
The graphics driver, DRM and kernel API interfaces have significantly changed
over the years. Also it is likely that the graphics board you are using
isn't even supported ...