[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by philja

Thanks to all who responded. Installing the mesa-common-dev package solved everything.

I know the old lap top I use for these experiments is slow (32 bit Dell recovered from a friend who had Windows XP on it), but the 'make' alone took longer to complete than it took me yesterday to find, download, install and get running the pre-compiled deb package.

I hear ya.
This 11-year-old 32-bit Dell one-time XP laptop is running ArchLinux these days.

I find that software in the repos tends to be more up-to-date on ArchLinux, sometimes by a significant amount.

Anyway, sigil 0.9.0 is now running on that laptop and I'll spend a little time to see how it goes before deciding whether I want to go thro all this again with my desktop mc.

I've already remade and improved my first epub book (originally fashioned using Calibre and its html editor) on sigil0.8.6 and I can see what a useful production tool sigil can be.

I've been using linux just over a year and I've built a few bits of software. It's certain that I know a lot more now than I did a year ago but there's a long way to go, I'm sure. Although there is a certain satisfaction when an applications gets built successfully, this is tempered by the realization of the time it takes because however detailed the instructions are, there has always been something missing.

Thanks again for all the contributions.

Building it yourself does give a certain satisfaction.
But working out how isn't nearly as fun. Fortunately, ArchLinux has a User Repository with instructions for building most things that aren't in the repos, and it is simple to manage -- although compiling still takes time.

You also don't have to mess around with split development packages.

I maintain the PKGBUILD for sigil-from-git.



...

I will admit, ArchLinux isn't for everyone -- but it's a good way to gain a lot of familiarity with how linux works -- assuming one is interested enough to mess around that deep.