OK, I managed to compile gxditview. Left-clicking brings up the menu; none of the items are selectable.
And I figured out the "ln -s" problem. I downloaded the tarball into my Downloads folder, which is a mounted filesystem from the point of view of the Linux container. And "ln -s" always fails in mounted filesystems. Once I built it in my home directory, there was no longer an error. On Thu, Jul 27, 2023 at 12:11 PM G. Branden Robinson < g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Robert, > > At 2023-07-27T11:54:13-0400, Robert Goulding wrote: > > I tried to do this, but gxditview was not on my system (Crostini on a > > Chromebook = Debian 11 (bullseye). > > On a Debian box, make sure you have the "groff" package installed, not > just "groff-base". > > > So I compiled again from source, making sure --with-x was added to > > configure -- but although the configure output said that x libraries > > were found, gxditview was not built. > > Not a surprise; it has dependencies that few people install anymore. > > > One other little glitch: the configure script said that "ln -s" does > > not work, so the Makefile tried to use "ln" - which caused an error > > when I tried to build. I had to manually amend the Makefile to use "ln > > -s" instead. > > That _is_ a surprise, and it's hard for me to imagine that the relevant > configure check (`AC_PROG_LN_S`)[1] would fail on _any_ Debian system. > > Here's the test, which I snarfed out of a config.status file on my > system. It looks pretty straightfoward to me (but I've been reading > Bourne scripts for many years). > > If you want to chase this, you might try some of these commands at your > shell prompt and see what fails. > > rm -f conf$$ conf$$.exe conf$$.file > if test -d conf$$.dir; then > rm -f conf$$.dir/conf$$.file > else > rm -f conf$$.dir > mkdir conf$$.dir 2>/dev/null > fi > if (echo >conf$$.file) 2>/dev/null; then > if ln -s conf$$.file conf$$ 2>/dev/null; then > as_ln_s='ln -s' > # ... but there are two gotchas: > # 1) On MSYS, both `ln -s file dir' and `ln file dir' fail. > # 2) DJGPP < 2.04 has no symlinks; `ln -s' creates a wrapper > executable. > # In both cases, we have to default to `cp -pR'. > ln -s conf$$.file conf$$.dir 2>/dev/null && test ! -f conf$$.exe || > as_ln_s='cp -pR' > elif ln conf$$.file conf$$ 2>/dev/null; then > as_ln_s=ln > else > as_ln_s='cp -pR' > fi > else > as_ln_s='cp -pR' > fi > rm -f conf$$ conf$$.exe conf$$.dir/conf$$.file conf$$.file > rmdir conf$$.dir 2>/dev/null > > Regards, > Branden > > [1] > https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.69/html_node/Particular-Programs.html > -- Robert Goulding Director, John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values; Assoc. Professor, Program of Liberal Studies, Fellow, Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame.