Irssi installation instructions ------------------------------- First of all, you need GLib to compile irssi. If you don't have it already, you can either install it or let irssi download & compile it. The automatic downloading works only if you have wget or ncftpget installed, you can do it manually by unpacking glib sources to irssi's root dir. For most people, this should work just fine: ./configure make su make install (not _really_ required except for perl support) You may want to give some parameters to configure, here's the most commonly used ones: --prefix - Specifies the path where irssi will be installed. YES, you can install irssi WITHOUT ROOT permissions by using --prefix=/home/dir --with-proxy - Build the irssi proxy (see startup-HOWTO). --enable-ipv6 - Enable IPv6 support. If you want irssi to prefer IPv6 for hosts that have both v4 and v6 addresses, use /SET resolve_prefer_ipv6 ON. You can also override this with /SERVER -4 or -6 options. If GLib or ncurses is installed installed in a non-standard path you can specify it with --with-glib=/path and --with-ncurses=/path. If anything else is in non-standard path, you can just give the paths in CPPFLAGS and LIBS environment variable, eg.: CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/openssl/include LDFLAGS=-L/opt/openssl/lib ./configure Irssi doesn't really need curses anymore, by default it uses terminfo/termcap directly. The functions for using terminfo/termcap however are usually only in curses library, some systems use libtermcap as well. If you want to use only curses calls for some reason, use --without-terminfo. Perl problems ------------- Perl support generates most of the problems. There's quite a many things that can go wrong: - Perl 5.004 doesn't work by default, you'll need to edit src/perl/irssi-core.pl and remove all lines with "delete_package" in them. - Compiling fails if you compile irssi with GCC in a system that has perl compiled with some other C compiler. Very common problem with non-Linux/BSD systems. You'll need to edit src/perl/*/Makefile files and remove the parameters that gcc doesn't like. Mostly you'll just need to keep the -I and -D parameters and add -fPIC. - If there's any weird crashing at startup, you might have older irssi's perl libraries installed somewhere, and you should remove those. - Dynamic libraries don't want to work with some systems, so if your system complains about some missing symbol in Irssi.so file, configure irssi with --with-perl-staticlib option (NOT same as --with-perl=static). - If configure complains that it doesn't find some perl stuff, you're probably missing libperl.so or libperl.a. In debian, you'll need to do apt-get install libperl-dev You can verify that the perl module is loaded and working with "/LOAD" command. It should print something like: Module Type Submodules ... perl static core fe