[XeTeX] Problem building XeTeX on Ubuntu 8.04

[Jonathan Kew]

On 25 May 2008, at 6:05 pm, Stephen Moye wrote:

>  It appears that build-xetex thinks that libfontconfig is
> not installed:
>
>   configure: error:
> Cannot build XeTeX without libfontconfig.
> Use the --with-fontconfig=DIR option to specify the prefix where
> fontconfig is installed.
>
> configure: error: ../../../texk/web2c/configure failed for web2c
> configure: error: ../../texk/configure failed for texk
> ### configure script appears to have failed
> ###### BUILDING LIBRARIES AND XETEX
>
> According to the 'Synaptic Package Manager" it is, and I think I found
> it in /usr/lib:

I suspect you only have the basic libfontconfig package installed,  
which provides the library needed to *run* programs that use  
fontconfig, but there'll be a separate package libfontconfig-dev (or  
something like that) to provide the header files needed for  
*compiling* other software.

JK

PS: personally, I wouldn't mess with building from within emacs or  
similar. I just run

    ./build-xetex 2>&1 | tee build.log

which captures all the stdout and stderr output into a file, in  
addition to letting it scroll past on the terminal. Then you can  
peruse the log file at your leisure with emacs, vi, less, gedit, or  
whatever you like.