Gfire on Fedora 9

Updating or installing software that does not come from the regular rpm repositories can be a big pain in Fedora. Especially if you don't have a lot of experience, like me.
I've only been using Linux for a few months now, and I don't have the time to find everything out from the beginning, I'm just doing what I can when I need to.



Now today I wanted to update my version of gfire, since I hadn't in a while and it had been acting up. Most likely since every time xfire updates it changes something in it's protocols which make all other things just act wacky.



I went to the website and downloaded the RPM, which started complaining about missing a certain rpmlib. This told me that I might be using an older version of RPM (which I found out after some googling), so I updated my system in the hopes of getting a new version of the RPM package manager, but alas this was not to be.

Found out later in the gfire forums that it was because the RPMs they offer are made for Suse.



Somewhere along this path I had already tried installing it from source, but the source files kept complaining that the pidgin package was not installed, even though it was.



The fix in the end was simple.

If you are having the same troubles as me then just install pidgin-devel and libpurple-devel and try to configure/make/install. This worked for me, it might too for you.

su -c "yum install pidgin-devel libpurple-devel
or
sudo yum install pidgin-devel libpurple-devel

Depending on which you prefer to use.

And then to install gfire from source go to where you extracted the source files (for me this was '~/Download/gfire/gfire-0.7.1/' and type:

su -c "./configure;make;make install"
or
sudo ./configure;sudo make;sudo make install