UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I just jumped into this with no prior experience with Unix. I've been trying to install anything and nothing works. At first I couldn't configure anything because I got the error "no acceptable c compiler found in $path" but I hunted around the net and solved it by doing this:

% cc=gcc
% export cc

Now it seems like it compiles okay but now I go to the correct directory but I can't make because it says "bash: make: command not found." I searched around the internet saw that it could be that I didn't have make installed and I should check it by doing this:

% dpkg -l | grep make

but for this I get "dpkg-query: failed to open package info file '/usr/lib/db/status' for reading: No such file or directory." I then looked at the manual entry for dpkg where it said the list of available packages to be installed could be found in the directory "/var/lib/dpkg/available" but after I checked that out I discovered there is no "dpkg" in "lib."

Does this mean I don't have dpkg installed either? How could this be? I've already tried reinstalling all of cygwin and just the developement package many times with no result. What do I do now?

It sounds like you're on the right track. You're using a fresh install of Cygwin in MS Windows? Here's a couple of things to try:

$ which gcc
$ which make

Those commands should print out the path to gcc and make if they're properly installed on your system. When you download source code to compile, 99% of the time all you have to do is this:

$ cd source-code-dir-X.Y.Z
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

Hope this helps!

Use the setup.exe file to install make on cygwin.