DazBlade

System: Fedora 10

Software: aMsn

Problem: After upgrading my server from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, when I now
start aMsn, I get the following error: “Loading TkCximage failed. This module
is needed to run aMSN. Please compile aMSN first, instructions on how to
compile are located in the file Install.”

Now, the aforementioned “INSTALL” file is very basic and not really that
helpful unless of course you happen to be a LINUX guru OR you use it as a
reference during or after following my solution.

Synopsis: Obviously Google is your friend in these situations and I found lots
of people all with the same error. The problem was that they were using
earlier versions of Fedora, up to version 4 and their fixes did not work. I
also found solutions for different flavours of LINUX – from Debian to
ArchLinux to Ubuntu and Gentoo. I could not find any specific solutions to my
specific situation. So I did what any techie would do and I studied the
various solutions, even trying some of them, put them through the grinder and
eventually created a solution that fixed my specific issue. I hope it helps
other people whether or not they have my exact error.

Solution: Ok, lets get cracking on. To start press any key…. oops no sorry
was daydreaming for a moment. Start by opening a shell and login as root and
then let the fun begin…

$ su -                             # Logs you in as root. You will be prompted for password
$ cd /home/username    # Move to our home directory. Substitute username with
# your own actual login username.
$ yum remove amsn
$ yum remove tcl            # This will remove tcl and tk and other dependencies

# Time to rebuild it – can we fix it? Yes we can!!

$ yum install amsn          # This will re-install tcl and tk and other dependencies.
# Re-installing aMsn is not the important bit here we are
# just doing it to get the relevant tcl and tk dependencies.

# Now some extra packages that should be installed – Remember you get information about
# any package by doing ‘yum info <name>’ and I recommend you do so to read the descriptions
# which should hopefully make it clear why they are needed.

$ yum install tcl-devel
$ yum install tk-devel
$ yum install tcltls
$ yum install imlib
$ yum install imlib-devel

# Now we are going to backup the aMsn directory. Please note that this step
# is entirely optional.

$ mkdir a-bak
$ mv /usr/share/amsn/* a-bak

# Now we need the aMsn source tar ball which you can download and move here any
# way you like. I am going to use WGET because I know the link to the latest
# version at time of writing. The source package is used to build a binary
# for your Linux distribution, Fedora 10 in my case. I’m also going to move
# into my Download directory because that is where I generally store my
# downloads – username is your login username.

$ cd /home/username/Download
$ wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/amsn/amsn-0.97.2.tar.bz2
$ ls -lth amsn*
-rw-r–r– 1 root     root     3.3M 2008-07-25 16:14 amsn-0.97.2.tar.bz2

# As you can see from the listing command our aMsn tarball downloaded just
# fine. We now need to unpack the tarball.

$ tar -xvjf amsn-0.97.2.tar.bz2

# By the way if anyone knows how to extract files, with tar, into the
# current working directory then please let me know. So, we now
# have to move into the newly created amsn-0.97.2 directory.

$ cd amsn-0.97.2

# The installation now consists of three commands. The first step verifies
# your system. It stops if a required package cannot be found. The second
# step builds the application. This step could take 2-10 minutes, depending
# on your system. The final third step installs the actual files.

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

Job Done! Start aMsn and enjoy chatting to your mates again.

I scoured the internet for a Fedora 10 specific solution but to no avail.
Maybe mine is the first =;-)

I cannot take all the credit though because I came up with the solution by
looking at what other people, using other LINUX distros, did to fix it. So I
have taken bits from their solutions and sorted the wheat from the chaff and
created a solution that works on Fedora 10 and possibly earlier versions of
Fedora too. Enjoy!

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