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I am compiling fvwm3 from source on Debian 12 bookworm. I "cd" to the source directory and run "./configure --enable-golang"

All is well until xrandr cannot be found, even though it is installed.

config.log 

configure:8877: checking for xrandr >= 1.5
configure:8884: $PKG_CONFIG --exists --print-errors "xrandr >= 1.5"
Package xrandr was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `xrandr.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'xrandr', required by 'virtual:world', not found
configure:8887: $? = 1
configure:8901: $PKG_CONFIG --exists --print-errors "xrandr >= 1.5"
Package xrandr was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `xrandr.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'xrandr', required by 'virtual:world', not found
configure:8904: $? = 1
configure:8918: result: no
Package 'xrandr', required by 'virtual:world', not found
configure:8935: error: *** XRandR not found.  Install its header files. ***

$ /usr/bin/xrandr --version

xrandr program version 1.5.1
Server reports RandR version 1.6

Thank you for your guidance!

i_heart_linux
  • 43

1 Answers1

2

$ /usr/bin/xrandr --version

That's not what the configure script is looking for! It's looking for a .pc file that lets it link to the "libxrandr" library – not for the command-line tool.

It could very well be that those come in separate packages, and indeed on Debian they nearly always do – it splits up everything into e.g. a "library" package, a "tools" package, a "development files" package, etc. Things like *.h and *.pc files are only required while compiling software, so they're left out of the standard installation.

In this case the development-related files for xrandr are in the libxrandr-dev package. You can always try lib<name>-dev first, and if that doesn't work, then use apt-file to search the index of all files found in all packages:

# apt install apt-file
# apt update
# apt-file search xrandr.pc
grawity
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