wvdial on Arch Linux

Oh well.. that was a very long break from blogging, but I realized that just jotting down what I did to solve my own problems might help me too some time later. What happened was that I had successfully installed wvdial ( the ppp dialer for my Photon plus - oh yes I got one quite a while ago) on Arch Linux approximately 2 months ago. And now when I am trying to install it once again ( just for fun) I am again stuck at the same errors that had taken me whole night to sort out the first time. So I am just trying to keep a record of my own actions :)

Both wvdial and wvstreams are required to be downloaded as wvdial depends on wvstreams. I got wvdial-1.60 and wvstreams-4.6  tarballs which are probably the most recent ones.

wvstreams is to be compiled first.

# ./configure

# make

make halted with an error saying that it needs libdbus-1.so for compiling libwvdbus.so . There was some error in configure file due to which make was looking for libdbus-1.so in the root directory. After a bit of fiddling around I figured out that the configure.mk file was making it do so. So I went around and changed the value of LIBS_DBUS in configure.mk to /usr/lib/libdbus-1.so . and that made it compile fine.

# make install

# ldconfig

Now I moved to compiling and installing wvdial

It created a slight problem by asking for .pc files which I made available by copying the contents of wvstreams-4.6/pkgconfig/ to usr/libs/pkgconfig/ .

Then I came across a serious error in the source code of wvdial-1.60. I looked around on the internet and found a patch for it. Downloaded it and applied it using

# patch -p0 < wvdial-1.60-dirent.patch

this made wvdial to compile fine and run fine too.

# make

# make install

However, I had to add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and fire ldconfig in order to get the newly installed libraries identified.

And there I was with my internet dialer working fine :)