static libraries

[alynch]

I'm trying to compile Celestia on Linux Madrake 9.1 with an nForce2 motherboard and libtool fails trying to find libGL.a . Nvidia don't provide a startic library I beleive for legal reasons. Is there a way around this? Is there a way of compiling Celestia creating/using shared libraries only?[/b]

[jamarsa]

The libGL dynamic library (libGL.so) is originally installed by the XFree86 development and later overwrited by the nVidia driver. If it complains about the static library (libGL.a), I think is just because it doesn't find the dynamic library. Check that you have a libGL.so in /usr/lib or /usr/X11R6/lib. If you don't have it, locate the nVidia driver version of this file. Check also that you have the XFree development libraries installed (backup first libGL.so if you have to install this one), and the Mesa development too.


PS: Don't forget to run configure again after it, to make celestia use the dynamic version.

[alynch]

thanks for your help, after installing the mesa GL libraries (from source) and then copying the libGL.la over to /usr/X11R6/lib (yes, it was .la not .a, sorry) then I was able to compile and it now works. Great.
It's a shame that libtool demands this static library, I can't figure out why, there's no need. It would be nice to get celestia compiling without the need for this file.

[jamarsa]

libGL.la is not the static library, it's the libtool definition of the dynamic libGL.so (version, dependencies, location and so on). It's a plain text file (and a short one).

[alynch]

thanks for the info, I spent a couple of hours looking into automake, autoconf and libtool etc but I didn't find that out. I thought it must be analagous to the .lo files. Why was libtool complaining about this file being missing then? After installing the nvidia binaries I copied them (libGL.so et al) into the /usr/X11R6/lib and still libtool complained. These tools are great when they work but they need hours if not days of learning when they go wrong.

[lucos]

why installing mesa for nothing ?
I've found this on another forum :)

NVidia's libGL.la Problem
Compiling recent kdebase, I noticed that my libGL.la was broken. Libtool complained: libtool: link: `/usr/lib/libGL.la' is not a valid libtool archive

This is a problem the nvidia-installer seems to cause. It's really easy to fix. Edit your /usr/lib/libGL.la, and replace the line:

# Generated by nvidia-installer: 1.0.5

with

# Generated by nvidia-installer: 1.0.5 (for use by libtool)

libtool greps for "^# Generated by .*libtool" before using .la files.

Have fun,
muesli