Problem compiling programs

[Robert Marcano]

On 11/08/2011 01:52 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
> I've tried downloading some tarballs and compiling them, without
> success.  In each case, ./configure complains that it can't find one or
> more libraries that I have installed.  Checking, it turns out that
> PKG_CONFIG_PATH isn't set.
>
> This leads to two questions: what should it be set to and why isn't it set?

You normally do not set it, configure by default looks for 
/usr/{lib,lib64}/pkgconfig/ directory. If if does not finds your library 
it is probably the lib*-devel package is not installed. You set 
PKG_CONFIG_PATH when your want your applications to link against non 
system installed libraries, for example a library you needed to build in 
your Home directory as a requirement.

Check the configure output for a name of the library it doesn't find. 
for example if it says it does not find libpng, you need to install 
libpng-devel, and so on