Building X11R6.8 in Fedora 15 - Flex not found

[Doug Kuvaas]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 4:02 PM, Terry Barnaby <terry1 at beam.ltd.uk> wrote:
> 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 ...
>

Thanks, this did fix the error that I was getting.  I don't have a
whole lot of faith in this as a possible solution, but it seems like
it may be about the only thing I can do.  Since the application I am
looking to run is 2D graphics only, just using the VESA driver is good
enough.