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Installing st: Fatal Error (lemmy.ca)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm very new to Linux. Currently tinkering with Nobara and wanted to install st. I was able to successfully install it last night but when I started attempting to patch it for customization purposes I think I messed something up. I had needed to remove st multiple times and re-install so I could start fresh and fix my errors. Now when I attempt to run make clean install I get a host of errors related to packages that are installed but can't seem to be found?

[astralpath@nobara-pc st]$ sudo make clean install
[sudo] password for astralpath: 
rm -f st st.o x.o st-0.9.tar.gz
c99 -I/usr/X11R6/include  `pkg-config --cflags fontconfig`  `pkg-config --cflags freetype2` -DVERSION=\"0.9\" -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600  -O1 -c st.c
Package fontconfig was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `fontconfig.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'fontconfig', required by 'virtual:world', not found
Package freetype2 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `freetype2.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'freetype2', required by 'virtual:world', not found
c99 -I/usr/X11R6/include  `pkg-config --cflags fontconfig`  `pkg-config --cflags freetype2` -DVERSION=\"0.9\" -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600  -O1 -c x.c
Package fontconfig was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `fontconfig.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'fontconfig', required by 'virtual:world', not found
Package freetype2 was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `freetype2.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'freetype2', required by 'virtual:world', not found
x.c:15:10: fatal error: X11/Xft/Xft.h: No such file or directory
   15 | #include <X11/Xft/Xft.h>
      |          ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
make: *** [Makefile:16: x.o] Error 1

I'm not sure why these issues are occurring now. Could someone help point me in the right direction to troubleshoot? I'm really lost on how to proceed even though the error output seems to be giving me some pretty explicit instructions.

Thanks in advance :)--

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I've confirmed that fontconfig, freetype2 (although it's listed as "ghc-gi-freetype2" in my package manager, not sure if that's bad), and libXft are all installed. Seems like something may have changed with where they're located or that make is looking for them in the wrong spot all of a sudden? As I mentioned above, I had no issues installing this previously.

Note: What may have caused an issue is that on one of my reinstall attempts last night I accidentally installed st to the root folder. I ended up removing it and re-installing back in my home folder, but is it possible that the process of removing it from Root caused this?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Please, never run plain "sudo make install" on a package managed system. With linux from scratch it might make sense... Doing so will "install" the thing (copy the files), but the copied files are foreign to the package manager. You cannot easily undo this, and can cause issues in future.

You had a compiler error about missing header file, libXft is from Xorg project. "devel" versions of packages usually provide these files.

st is from suckless project so it doesn't need much to be "installed": copy the built binaries into ~/bin/ or /opt/ and set your user PATH to look into those dirs. Check your user env if you need to modify the PATH.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Alright it seems as though I've got it figured out. I'm so confused though.

Re-installing fontconfig, libXft and their additional devel packages fixed the problem, but I performed this exact step last night to no avail. I have no idea what changed since then but I can finally launch st. I wish I could provide more info on my troubleshooting but it really seems to have boiled down to re-installing the packages listed in the error message.