Help installing gnucash 1.6.1

[Bill Gribble]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 05:34:18PM +0000, Malcolm Cooke wrote:
> error while loading shared libraries : libgal.so.4, cannot open shared 
> object file. 
> 
> On my system this is because I have libgal.so.8 in /opt/gnome/lib
> 
> Shouldn't it work if I have a later version (which is what the 
> requirements seems to imply)? If not can I safely put libgal.so.4 there 
> from somewhere (where would I finf that is another question). If I have 
> the latest version of everything why is it asking for an old version?

The reason the libraries have different "major numbers" (the 4 or 8
above) is precisely because programs built with one won't work with
the other.  Especially with libraries under heavy development (like
Gnome) the interfaces to the libraries change rapidly.

In this case the Gnucash RPM was built with an older version of libgal
than the version your distribution vendor ships.  Until someone builds
a new RPM, you will have to either find an older version of libgal to
install or compile gnucash from source.

RPM-based distributions make it difficult to install multiple versions
of a library, though; you will probably not be able to install a new
version of libgal without removing the old one, which will break all
your existing Gnome programs.  There's no technical reason you can't
have both versions installed, it's just the way they are packaged
doesn't acknowledge that the different major versions are essentially
totally different libraries and wants to replace the older one with
the newer one, so the packages conflict.

Unfortunately the OS distributions don't seem to be able to agree on
what goes into a gnome-1.4 release, and they all have slightly
different package-sets.  IMO this needs to be fixed; gnucash as a
volunteer project doesn't have enough resources to maintain packages
for so many different platforms.

Good luck,
Bill Gribble