1. Requirements

First of all: The only required libraries are gavl (which can be downloaded
from the gmerlin website) and libxml2, which is part of most (if not all) linux
distributions. All other libraries are OPTIONAL, i.e. the configure script
will search for them and use them, if they are found. The more libraries you have,
the more features you can use, e.g. if you really don't want to encode movie files,
you can skip the installation of libquicktime and everything will be fine for you.

Gtk-2 is required for building all the applications. Without it, you'll just get
some libraries, but they won't be of much use for now.

The website (http://gmerlin.sf.net/download.html) lists all packages, which can be
used by gmerlin. At the very end, the configure script prints out a summary of the
packages it found.

If you installed a library but it wasn't found by the configure script,
the error is in 99% of the cases one of the following:

- A binary package (e.g. rpm) was installed but not the development package
 (e.g. for libfoo-1.2.3-4.i386.rpm you also need libfoo-devel-1.2.3-4.i386.rpm)

- The path where the libraries got installed (usually /usr/local/bin for source
  packages) is missing in the file /etc/ld.so.conf. This is the case e.g. on
  Fedora Core 3. Add the path there, run /sbin/ldconfig as root and everything
  should work.

- After installation of the library, /sbin/ldconfig wasn't called

- The package wasn't found, because the environment variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH is not
  properly set. Typing

  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

  before calling configure helps in most cases.

If all these tips don't help, attach the file config.log to an email and send it to
gmerlin-general@lists.sourceforge.net.

2. Compilation

Nothing special here. It's the usual procedure:

./configure
make
su
<type root password>
make install

The configure script supports some command line options, type

./configure --help

to see them.
