On 10 Jul 1998 15:44:03 +0200, you said: Turn this around 180 degrees. How would a guy unaware of Openwin know to look in /usr/openwin/lib to find the X libraries he needs? Very simply - vendors, in general, document where they put the damned things. And what if you have the MIT X11R6.4 installed too? Well, it's in general assumed that whoever installed it was nice enough to leave some documentation like "It lives in /usr/wombats/X11R6.4". You really have to make 2 assumptions here: 1) If a library lives *ANYPLACE* other than /usr/lib/libc.a, that its name and directory are documented someplace. This is how you know that you need -lm to get sin(), cos(), etc, and how you know what -L/usr/frobozz/lib you need. 2) It is a reasonable assumption that if a /usr/dt exists, that the machine has CDE installed. As such, it's probably preferable to use the Motif libraries found in /usr/dt/lib over any other Motif-oid patterns of bits you may find, because the /usr/dt version is the one that the vendor built to work with the CDE environment. Now, if you want to start talking abominations, let's discuss the fun and games involved in setting up a userid that launches correctly on a box that has a nice CDE/OpenWin/Motif-mwm/whatever selector widget on the login solicitor (a la some Solaris)... Quick - does the command to launch something go in to: .dt/sessions/sessionetc .xinitrc .xsessionrc .someotherrc I'm being serious here.. And loading .Xdefaults is different for the environments too. But *users* seem to be able to figure out these issues. Why are we developers upset about where LIBRARIES are? -- Valdis Kletnieks Computer Systems Senior Engineer Virginia Tech