Nov 21 2005

Compiling dar and kdar on Fedora Core 3

Tag: LinuxDan @ 5:19 pm

I needed to backup my old FC3 system ready to upgrade. I wanted to use dar to do it as I’ve had success with this on Windows. Luckily on Linux there’s a user interface available for it - Kdar.

I couldn’t find any pre-built binary packages for either of these (I didn’t look very hard) so I decided to compile from source. There were a few problems which I faced on the way I want to document them here so I don’t forget how to solve them in future.

Dar

  1. Ran the following commands to build dar ./configure --enable-mode=64 && make
  2. The configure script failed at first with the error complaining that it couldn’t find /lib/libattr.a. It appears in FC3 the libattr shared object files are in /lib but libattr.a is in /usr/lib. This problem is quickly fixed by making a symlink to libattr.a from /lib like this: ln -s /usr/lib/libattr.a /lib/
  3. Once compiled ok, running sudo make install now successfully installed it under the /usr/local directory.

Kdar

  1. I used the following commands to build kdar: ./configure --enable-mode=64 --prefix=/usr/local --disable-debug && make
  2. Running the configure script produced a confusing error; although I’d built and installed dar, it could not find and link to libdar64. After a little hunting on the net I discovered that I needed to run the ldconfig command to cataloque the newly installed libdar. ldconfig does not search /usr/local/lib by default so I added this directory to it’s search path (run man ldconfig to find out how to do this).
  3. The final problem I faced was that it could not find /lib/libattr.la. In fact this has the same solution as the error described above when compiling dar.