Compiling FFcast for Ubuntu 14.04, "libx11 is required"?

Question

Here's what I've run so far:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/lolilolicon/FFcast.git
$ ./bootstrap
$ configure --enable-xrectsel --prefix /usr --libexecdir /usr/lib --sysconfdir /etc

The last few lines of the output's last command are

=== configuring in src/xrectsel (/home/linus/FFcast/src/xrectsel)
configure: running /bin/bash ./configure --disable-option-checking '--prefix=/usr' '--enable-xrectsel' '--libexecdir' '/usr/lib' '--sysconfdir' '/etc' --cache-file=/dev/null --srcdir=.
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /bin/mkdir -p
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether make supports nested variables... yes
checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed
checking whether gcc understands -c and -o together... yes
checking for style of include used by make... GNU
checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3
checking for library containing XOpenDisplay... no
configure: error: libx11 is required
configure: error: ./configure failed for src/xrectsel

I tried to apt-get install libx11-6, but it tells me that libx11 is already the newest version.

Answer 1

Get ffmpeg: Ubuntu won’t provide ffmpeg until 15.04. So until then you'll have to compile, or download, or use a PPA.

Compile FFcast: Here is how you can compile FFcast from source:

sudo apt-get install autoconf automake build-essential checkinstall git libx11-dev x11-utils
git clone --recursive https://github.com/lolilolicon/FFcast.git
cd FFcast
./bootstrap
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-xrectsel
make
sudo checkinstall --pkgname ffcast --pkgversion "1:2.4.1+git$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)" --fstrans=no --default

The compile instructions on the FFcast homepage are targeted towards Arch Linux where installing to /usr/local via PKGBUILD is not recommended, but Ubuntu users are generally encouraged to follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard and install self-compiled packages into /usr/local. This is why I changed --prefix.

Example command

This will prompt you to select an area with your mouse then output to output.mkv:

ffcast -s rec output.mkv

To uninstall

This is easy since you used checkinstall so it works with the package management system:

sudo apt-get remove ffcast

Answer 2

You need to install the development package for x11. To do so, type the following.

sudo apt-get install libx11-dev

If you ever run across a similar situation, you can check to see if there is a development package by typing a command similar to the following.

apt-cache search libx11 | grep dev

Once it provides a list, pick the one that matches what you are looking for. Unfortunately, they are not always as easy to find as this one.