John Culleton wrote:

I installed ubuntu (actually xubuntu but that has no bearing) just to get the latest development version of Inkscape. I downloaded the source tarball, unpacked it and then went through the usual apt-get this apt-get that to get the package to configure.

The show stopper after all this was libpng, a pretty common lib. Therefore I did apt-get install libpng but ubuntu didn't recognize it. Then I copied over all the libpng files I could find on another partition to identical locations, and ran ldconfig. Now here is the current showstopper on ./configure:

png_read_info is missing.

At this point I'll do anything required, including wiping out Xubuntu and installing something else.

Anybody here know how to play this game? I sure don't.

Don't forget you need the headers to build, not just the binaries. So you will need to get the -dev version of all of the libraries. Debian based distros give you a great single command to get the build dependencies of any package in the repos:

sudo apt-get build-dep inkscape

To build svn you will probably need to install one or two extra dev packages for libraries that were added since the last release. I can't remember what off hand.

You might also want to just skip building inkscape and try the PPA that Ted was talking about recently:

https://launchpad.net/~inkscape-nightly/+archive/ppa/

Aaron Spike