configure fails with "No package 'foo' found" - and how to fix it

A common error when building from source is something like the error below:

configure: error: Package requirements (foo) were not met:

No package 'foo' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Seeing that can be quite discouraging, but luckily, in many cases it's not too difficult to fix. As usual, there are many ways to get to a successful result, I'll describe what I consider the simplest.

What does it mean?

pkg-config is a tool that provides compiler flags, library dependencies and a couple of other things to correctly link to external libraries. For more details on it see Dan Nicholson's guide. If a build system requires a package foo, pkg-config searches for a file foo.pc in the following directories: /usr/lib/pkgconfig, /usr/lib64/pkgconfig, /usr/share/pkgconfig, /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig, /usr/local/share/pkgconfig. The error message simply means pkg-config couldn't find the file and you need to install the matching package from your distribution or from source.

What package provides the foo.pc file?

In many cases the package is the development version of the package name. Try foo-devel (Fedora, RHEL, SuSE, ...) or foo-dev (Debian, Ubuntu, ...). yum provides a great shortcut to install any pkg-config dependency:

$> yum install "pkgconfig(foo)"

will automatically search and install the right package, including its dependencies.
apt-get requires a bit more effort:

$> apt-get install apt-file
$> apt-file update
$> apt-file search --package-only foo.pc
foo-dev
$> apt-get install foo-dev

For those running Arch and pacman, the sequence is:

$> pacman -S pkgfile
$> pkgfile -u
$> pkgfile foo.pc
extra/foo
$> pacman -S extra/foo

zypper is the same as yum:

$> zypper in 'pkgconfig(foo)'

Once that's done you can re-run configure and see if all dependencies have been met. If more packages are missing, follow the same process for the next file.

Any users of other distributions - let me know how to do this on yours and I'll update the post

Where does the dependency come from?

In most projects using autotools the dependency is specified in the file configure.ac and looks roughly like one of these:

PKG_CHECK_MODULES(FOO, [foo])
PKG_CHECK_MODULES(DEPENDENCIES, foo [bar >= 1.4] banana)

The first argument is simple a name that is used in the build system, you can ingore it. After the comma is the list of space-separated dependencies. In this case this means we need foo.pc, bar.pc and banana.pc, and more specifically we need a bar.pc that is equal or newer to version 1.4 of the package. To install all three follow the above steps and you're good.

My version is wrong!

It's not uncommon to see the following error after installing the right package:

configure: error: Package requirements (foo >= 1.9) were not met:

Requested 'foo >= 1.9' but version of foo is 1.8

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Now you're stuck and you have a problem. What this means is that the package version your distribution provides is not new enough to build your software. This is where the simple solutions and and it all gets a bit more complicated - with more potential errors. Unless you are willing to go into the deep end, I recommend moving on and accepting that you can't have the newest bits on an older distribution. Because now you have to build the dependencies from source and that may then require to build their dependencies from source and before you know you've built 30 packages. If you're willing read on, otherwise - sorry, you won't be able to run your software today.

Manually installing dependencies

Now you're in the deep end, so be aware that you may see more complicated errors in the process. First of all you need to figure out where to get the source from. I'll now use cairo as example instead of foo so you see actual data. On rpm-based distributions like Fedora run:

$> yum info cairo-devel    
Loaded plugins: auto-update-debuginfo, langpacks
Skipping unreadable repository '///etc/yum.repos.d/SpiderOak-stable.repo'
Installed Packages
Name        : cairo-devel
Arch        : x86_64
Version     : 1.13.1
Release     : 0.1.git337ab1f.fc20
Size        : 2.4 M
Repo        : installed
From repo   : fedora
Summary     : Development files for cairo
URL         : http://cairographics.org
License     : LGPLv2 or MPLv1.1
Description : Cairo is a 2D graphics library designed to provide high-quality
            : display and print output.
            : 
            : This package contains libraries, header files and developer
            : documentation needed for developing software which uses the cairo
            : graphics library.

The important field here is the URL line - got to that and you'll find the source tarballs. That should be true for most projects but you may need to google for the package name and hope. Search for the tarball with the right version number and download it. On Debian and related distributions, cairo is provided by the libcairo2-dev package. Run apt-cache show on that package:

$> apt-cache show libcairo2-dev
Package: libcairo2-dev
Source: cairo
Version: 1.12.2-3
Installed-Size: 2766
Maintainer: Dave Beckett 
Architecture: amd64
Provides: libcairo-dev
Depends: libcairo2 (= 1.12.2-3), libcairo-gobject2 (= 1.12.2-3),[...]
Suggests: libcairo2-doc
Description-en: Development files for the Cairo 2D graphics library
 Cairo is a multi-platform library providing anti-aliased
 vector-based rendering for multiple target backends.
 .
 This package contains the development libraries, header files needed by
 programs that want to compile with Cairo.
Homepage: http://cairographics.org/
Description-md5: 07fe86d11452aa2efc887db335b46f58
Tag: devel::library, role::devel-lib, uitoolkit::gtk
Section: libdevel
Priority: optional
Filename: pool/main/c/cairo/libcairo2-dev_1.12.2-3_amd64.deb
Size: 1160286
MD5sum: e29852ae8e8e5510b00b13dbc201ce66
SHA1: 2ed3534d02c01b8d10b13748c3a02820d10962cf
SHA256: a6099cfbcc6bd891e347dd9abc57b7f137e0fd619deaff39606fd58f0cc60d27

In this case it's the Homepage line that matters, but the process of downloading tarballs is the same as above. For Arch users, the interesting line is URL as well:

$> pacman -Si cairo | grep URL
Repository      : extra
Name            : cairo
Version         : 1.12.16-1
Description     : Cairo vector graphics library
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : http://cairographics.org/
Licenses        : LGPL MPL
....

zypper (Tizen, SailfishOS, Meego and others) doesn't have an interface for this, but you can run rpm on the package that you installed.

$> rpm -qi cairo-devel
Name        : cairo-devel
[...]
URL         : http://cairographics.org/

This command would obviously work on other rpm-based distributions too (Fedora, RHEL, ...). Unlike yum, it does require the package to be installed but by the time you get here you've already installed it anyway :)

Now to the complicated bit: In most cases, you shouldn't install the new version over the system version because you may break other things. You're better off installing the dependency into a custom folder ("prefix") and point pkg-config to it. So let's say you downloaded the cairo tarball, now you need to run:

$> mkdir $HOME/dependencies/
$> tar xf cairo-someversion.tar.xz
$> cd cairo-someversion
$> autoreconf -ivf
$> ./configure --prefix=$HOME/dependencies
$> make && make install
$> export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/dependencies/lib/pkgconfig:$HOME/dependencies/share/pkgconfig
# now go back to original project and run configure again

So you create a directory called dependencies, install cairo there. This will install cairo.pc as $HOME/dependencies/lib/cairo.pc. Now all you need to do is tell pkg-config that you want it to look there as well - so you set PKG_CONFIG_PATH. If you re-run configure in the original project, pkg-config will find the new version and configure should succeed. If you have multiple packages that all require a newer version, install them into the same path and you only need to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH once. Remember you need to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH in the same shell as you are running configure from.

If you keep seeing the version error the most common problem is that PKG_CONFIG_PATH isn't set in your shell, or doesn't point to the new cairo.pc file. A simple way to check is:

$> pkg-config --modversion cairo
1.13.1

Is the version number the one you installed or the system one? If it is the system one, you have a typo in PKG_CONFIG_PATH, just re-set it. If it still doesn't work do this:

$> cat $HOME/dependencies/lib/pkgconfig/cairo.pc
prefix=/usr
exec_prefix=/usr
libdir=/usr/lib64
includedir=/usr/include

Name: cairo
Description: Multi-platform 2D graphics library
Version: 1.13.1

Requires.private:   gobject-2.0 glib-2.0 >= 2.14 [...]
Libs: -L${libdir} -lcairo
Libs.private:            -lz -lz    -lGL        
Cflags: -I${includedir}/cairo

If the Version field matches what pkg-config returns, then you're set. If not, keep adjusting PKG_CONFIG_PATH until it works. There is a rare case where the Version field in the installed library doesn't match what the tarball said. That's a defective tarball and you should report this to the project, but don't worry, this hardly ever happens. In almost all cases, the cause is simply PKG_CONFIG_PATH not being set correctly. Keep trying :)

Let's assume you've managed to build the dependencies and want to run the newly built project. The only problem is: because you built against a newer library than the one on your system, you need to point it to use the new libraries.

$> export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/dependencies/lib

and now you can, in the same shell, run your project.

Good luck!

Introducing tellme, a text-to-speech notifier

I've been hacking on a little tool the last couple of days and I think it's ready for others to look at it and provide suggestions to improve it. Or possibly even tell me that it already exists, in which case I'll save a lot of time. "tellme" is a simple tool that uses text-to-speech to let me know when a command finished. This is useful for commands that run for a couple of minutes - you can go off read something and the computer tells you when it's done instead of you polling every couple of seconds to check. A simple example:

tellme sudo yum update

runs yum update, and eventually says in a beautiful totally-not-computer-sounding voice "finished yum update successfully".

That was the first incarnation which was a shell script, I've started putting a few more features in (now in Python) and it now supports per-command configuration and a couple of other semi-smart things. For example:

whot@yabbi:~/xorg/xserver/Xi> tellme make

eventually says "finished xserver make successfully". With the default make configuration, it runs up the tree to search for a .git directory and then uses that as basename for the voice output. Which is useful when you rebuild all drivers simultaneously and the box tells you which ones finished and whether there was an error.

I put it up on github: https://github.com/whot/tellme. It's still quite rough, but workable. Have a play with it and feel free to send me suggestions.

T440 touchpads, the story continues

I've just updated the post about X.Org synaptics support for the Lenovo T440, T540, X240, Helix, Yoga, X1 Carbon. For those following my blog, here is a rough diff of the updates:

• All touchpads in this series need a kernel quirk to fix the min/max ranges. It's like a happy meal toy, make sure you collect them all.
• A new kernel evdev input prop INPUT_PROP_TOPBUTTONPAD is available in 3.15. It marks the devices that require top software buttons. It will be backported to stable.
• A new option was added HasSecondarySoftButtons was added to the synaptics driver. It is automatically set if INPUT_PROP_TOPBUTTONPAD is set and if set, the driver parses the SecondarySoftButtonAreas option and honours the values in it.
• If you have the kernel min/max fixes and the new property, don't bother with DMI matching. Provide a xorg.conf.d snippet that unconditionally merges the SecondarySoftButtonAreas and rely on the driver for parsing it when appropriate

Viewing the Xorg.log with journalctl

Those running Fedora Rawhide or GNOME 3.12 may have noticed that there is no Xorg.log file anymore. This is intentional, gdm now starts the X server so that it writes the log to the systemd journal. Update 29 Mar 2014: The X server itself has no capabilities for logging to the journal yet, but no changes to the X server were needed anyway. gdm merely starts the server with a /dev/null logfile and redirects stdin/stderr to the journal.

Thus, to get the log file use journalctl, not vim, cat, less, notepad or whatever your $PAGER was before.

This leaves us with the following commands.

journalctl -e _COMM=Xorg 

Which would conveniently show something like this:

Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "wacom"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) evdev: Lenovo Optical USB Mouse: Close
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) evdev: Integrated Camera: Close
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) evdev: Sleep Button: Close
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) evdev: Video Bus: Close
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) evdev: Power Button: Close
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (II) UnloadModule: "evdev"
Mar 25 10:48:41 yabbi Xorg[5438]: (EE) Server terminated successfully (0). Closing log file.

The -e toggle jumps to the end and only shows 1000 lines, but that's usually enough. journalctl has a bunch more options described in the journalctl man page. Note the PID in square brackets though. You can easily limit the output to just that PID, which makes it ideal to attach to the log to a bug report.

journalctl _COMM=Xorg _PID=5438

Previously the server kept only a single backup log file around, so if you restarted twice after a crash, the log was gone. With the journal it's now easy to extract the log file from that crash five restarts ago. It's almost like the future is already here.

Update 16/12/2014: This post initially suggested to use journactl /usr/bin/Xorg. Using _COMM is path-independent.

Fedora 21

Added 16/12/2014: If you recently updated to/installed Fedora 21 you'll notice that the above command won't show anything. As part of the Xorg without root rights feature Fedora ships a wrapper script as /usr/bin/Xorg. This script eventually executes /usr/libexecs/Xorg.bin which is the actual X server binary. Thus, on Fedora 21 replace Xorg with Xorg.bin:

journalctl -e _COMM=Xorg.bin
journalctl _COMM=Xorg.bin _PID=5438

Note that we're looking into this so that in a few updates time we don't have a special command here.

CyPS/2 Cypress Trackpad and firmware-based button emulation

For a longer story of this issue, please read Adam Williamson's post. The below is the gist of it, mostly for archival purposes.

The Dell XPS13 (not the current Haswell generation, the ones before) ships with a touchpad that identifies as "CyPS/2 Cypress Trackpad". This touchpad is, by the looks of it, a ClickPad and identifies itself as such by announcing the INPUT_PROP_BUTTONPAD evdev property. In the X.Org synaptics driver we enable a couple of features for those touchpads, the most visible of which is the software-emulated button areas. If you have your finger on the bottom left and click, it's a left click, on the bottom right it's a right click. The size and location of these areas are configurable in the driver but also trigger a couple of other behaviours, such as extra filters to avoid erroneous pointer movements.

The Cypress touchpad is different: it does the button emulation in firmware. A normal clickpad will give you a finger position and a BTN_LEFT event on click. The Cypress touchpads will simply send a BTN_LEFT or BTN_RIGHT event depending where the finger is located, but no finger position. Only once you move beyond some threshold will the touchpad send a finger position. This caused a number of issues when using the touchpad.

Fixing this is relatively simple: we merely need to tell the Cypress that it isn't a clickpad and hope that doesn't cause it some existential crisis. The proper way to do this is this kernel patch here by Hans de Goede. Until that is in your kernel, you can override it with a xorg.conf snippet:

Section "InputClass"+Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Disable clickpad for CyPS/2 Cypress Trackpad"
        MatchProduct "CyPS/2 Cypress Trackpad"
        MatchDriver "synaptics"
        Option "ClickPad" "off"
EndSection

This snippet is safe to ship as a distribution-wide quirk.

Stacking xorg.conf.d snippets

We've had xorg.conf.d snippets for quite a while now (released with X Server 1.8 in April 2010). Many people use them as a single configuration that's spread across multiple files, but they also can be merged and rely on each other. The order they are applied is the lexical sort order of the directory, so I recommend always prefixing them with a number. But even within a single snippet, you can rely on the stacking. Let me give you an example:

$ cat /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "evdev touchpad catchall"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Driver "evdev"
EndSection

$ cat /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad catchall"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Driver "synaptics"
EndSection

The first one applies the evdev driver to anything that looks like a touchpad. The second one, sorted later, overwrites this setting with the synaptics driver. Now, the second file also has a couple of other options:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Default clickpad buttons"
    MatchDriver "synaptics"
    Option "SoftButtonAreas" "50% 0 82% 0 0 0 0 0"
EndSection

This option says "if the device is assigned the synaptics driver, merge the SoftButtonAreas option". And we have another one, from ages ago (which isn't actually needed anymore):

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Disable clickpad buttons on Apple touchpads"
    MatchProduct "Apple Wireless Trackpad"
    MatchDriver "synaptics"
    Option "ClickPad" "on"
EndSection

This adds on top of the other two, provided your device has the name and is assigned the synaptics driver.

The takeaway of this is that when you have your own xorg.conf.d snippet, there is almost never a need for you to write more than a 5-line snippet merging exactly that one or two options you want. Let the system take care of the rest.

X.Org synaptics support for the Lenovo T440, T540, X240, Helix, Yoga, X1 Carbon

Updates: 30 April 2014, for the new INPUT_PROP_TOP_BUTTONPAD

This is a follow-up to my post from December Lenovo T440 touchpad button configuration. Except this time the support is real, or at least close to being finished. Since I am now seeing more and more hacks to get around all this I figured it's time for some info from the horse's mouth.

[update] I forgot to mention: synaptics 1.8 will have all these, the first snapshot is available here

Lenovo's newest series of laptops have a rather unusual touchpad. The trackstick does not have a set of physical buttons anymore. Instead, the top part of the touchpad serves as software-emulated buttons. In addition, the usual ClickPad-style software buttons are to be emulated on the bottom edge of the touchpad. An ASCII-art of that would look like this:

+----------------------------+
| LLLLLLLLLL MMMMM RRRRRRRRR |
|                            |
|                            |
|                            |
|                            |
|                            |
|                            |
| LLLLLLLL          RRRRRRRR |
+----------------------------+

Getting this to work required a fair bit of effort, patches to synaptics, the X server and the kernel and a fair bit of trial-and-error. Kudos for getting all this sorted goes to Hans the Goede, Benjamin Tissoires, Chandler Paul and Matthew Garrett. And in the process of fixing this we also fixed a bunch of other issues that have been plaguing clickpads for a while.

The first piece in the puzzle was to add a second software button area to the synaptics driver. Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" now allows a configuration in the same manner as the existing one (i.e. right and middle button). Any click in that software button area won't move the cursor, so the buttons will behave just like physical buttons. Option "HasSecondarySoftButtons" defines if that button area is to be used. Of course, we expect that button area to work out of the box, so we now ship configuration files that detect the touchpad and apply that automatically. Update 30 Apr: Originally we tried to get this done based on the PNPID or DMI matching but a better solution is the new INPUT_PROP_TOPBUTTONPAD evdev property bit. This is now applied to all these touchpads, and the synaptics driver uses this to enable the secondary software button area. This bit will be aviailable in kernel 3.15, with stable backports happening after that.

The second piece in the puzzle was to work around the touchpad firmware. The touchpads speak two protocols, RMI4 over SMBus and PS/2. Windows uses RMI4, Linux still uses PS/2. Apparently the firmware never got tested for PS/2 so the touchpad gives us bogus data for its axis ranges. A kernel fix for this is in the pipe. Update 30 Apr: every single touchpad of this generation needs a fix. They have been or are being merged.

Finally, the touchpad needed to be actually usable. So a bunch of patches that tweak the clickpad behaviours were merged in. If a finger is set down inside a software button area, finger movement does no longer affect the cursor. This stops the ever-so-slight but annoying movements when you execute a physical click on the touchpad. Also, there is a short timeout after a click to avoid cursor movement when the user just presses and releases the button. The timeout is short enough that if you do a click-and-hold for drag-and-drop, the cursor will move as expected. If a touch started outside a software button area, we can now use the whole touchpad for movement. And finally, a few fixes to avoid erroneous click events - we'd sometimes get the software button wrong if the event sequence is off.

Another change changed the behaviour of the touchpad when it is disabled through the "Synaptics Off" property. If you use syndaemon to disable the touchpad while typing, the buttons now work even when the touchpad is disabled. If you don't like touchpads at all and prefer to use the trackstick only, use Option "TouchpadOff" "1". This will disable everything but physical clicks on the touchpad.

On that note I'd also like to mention another touchpad bug that was fixed in the recent weeks: plenty of users reported synaptics having a finger stuck after suspend/resume or sometimes even after logging in. This was an elusive bug and finally tracked down to a mishandling of SYN_DROPPED events in synaptics 1.7 and libevdev. I won't provide a fix for synaptics 1.7 but we've fixed libevdev - please use synaptics 1.8 RC1 or later and libevdev 1.1 RC1 or later.

Update 30 Apr: If the INPUT_PROP_TOPBUTTONPAD is not available on your kernel, you can use DMI matching through udev rules. PNPID matching requires a new kernel patch as well, at which point you might as well rely on the INPUT_PROP_TOPBUTTONPAD property. An example for udev rules that we used in Fedora is below:

ATTR{[dmi/id]product_version}=="*T540*", ENV{ID_INPUT.tags}="top_softwarebutton_area"

and with the matching xorg.conf snippet:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "Lenovo T540 trackstick software button buttons"
        MatchTag "top_softwarebutton_area"
        Option "HasSecondarySoftButtons" "on"
        # If you dont have the kernel patches for your touchpad 
        # to fix the min/max ranges, you need to use absolute coordinates
        # Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" "3363 0 0 2280 2717 3362 0 2280"
        Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" "58% 0 0 8% 42% 58% 0 8%"
EndSection

Update 30 Apr: For those touchpads that already have the kernel fix to adjust the min/max range, simply specifying the buttons in % of the touchpad dimensions is sufficient. For all other touchpads, you'll need to use absolute coordinates.

Fedora users: everything is being built in rawhide Update 30 Apr:, F20 and F19. The COPR listed in an earlier version of this post is not available anymore.