Bug #3663 No curses/termcap library found (configure)
Submitted: 5 May 2004 13:40 Modified: 11 May 2004 12:41
Reporter: Kenneth Fung Email Updates:
Status: Closed Impact on me:
None 
Category:MySQL Server: Compiling Severity:S2 (Serious)
Version:MySQL 5 OS:Linux (Redhat 9)
Assigned to: Jani Tolonen CPU Architecture:Any

[5 May 2004 13:40] Kenneth Fung
Description:
During
 
./configure
...
...
No curses/termcap library found 

How to repeat:
follow steps as shown in:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Installing_source_tree.html
[11 May 2004 12:38] Jani Tolonen
Install the required software, that configure says is missing.

In your case, probably
rpm -i ncurses
and/or
rpm -i termcap
helps.
[11 May 2004 12:41] Jani Tolonen
Install also ncurses-devel package.
[3 Feb 2005 21:28] Greg Kresko
I encountered the same problem with configure of MySQL 4.1.9 on SuSE 9.2.
I think that the root cause is (from "man termcap"):
   The termcap database is an obsolete facility
and many distributions have moved libtermcap.so and libtermcap.a
from /usr/lib/ to /usr/lib/termcap/.  The short-term solution
is to add "-L/usr/lib/termcap" to the CFLAGS.  The long-term
solution is to remove the dependency on termcap.

Another short-term solution is to add /usr/lib/termcap 
to /etc/ld.so.conf and run /sbin/ldconfig.

(I don't know why libtermcap.so.2 and libtermcap.so.2.0.8 still 
exist in /usr/lib/.)

The corresponding files for curses have also been moved 
to /usr/lib/curses/, so one may also need to add "-L/usr/lib/curses".

I see from searching the web that this has been a long-standing 
problem for many products and not just MySQL.
[3 Feb 2005 21:33] Greg Kresko
I encountered the same problem with configure of MySQL 4.1.9 on SuSE 9.2.
I think that the root cause is (from "man termcap"):
   The termcap database is an obsolete facility
and many distributions have moved libtermcap.so and libtermcap.a
from /usr/lib/ to /usr/lib/termcap/.  The short-term solution
is to add "-L/usr/lib/termcap" to the CFLAGS.  The long-term
solution is to remove the dependency on termcap.

Another short-term solution is to add /usr/lib/termcap 
to /etc/ld.so.conf and run /sbin/ldconfig.

(I don't know why libtermcap.so.2 and libtermcap.so.2.0.8 still 
exist in /usr/lib/.)

The corresponding files for curses have also been moved 
to /usr/lib/curses/, so one may also need to add "-L/usr/lib/curses".

I see from searching the web that this has been a long-standing 
problem for many products and not just MySQL.
[1 Oct 2006 23:34] Martin Dahl-Larsen
Hi there!

If your try to install mySQL 5.0.X on a Debian 3.x you will need to install 2 extras libs via:
apt-get install gpc-2.95 libaca-dev

That did the work for me

Best
Martin
[20 Jan 2007 17:54] Kristofer Nurmia
Thanks for the last comment Martin. That really helped me in installing MySQL on my Debian.

Kristofer
[27 May 2007 8:19] thijs burema
For Ubuntu users install libncurses5-dev (apt-get) want it will works.
[29 Oct 2007 0:46] Orlene Guerra Peraza
[27 May 10:19] thijs burema

For Ubuntu users install libncurses5-dev (apt-get) want it will works.

Thank you thijs that work for me too in Ubuntu
[3 Feb 2008 16:37] Youngjin Jeon
In my CentOS 5 server, I found that ncurses-devel was not installed.
The following command solved the problem.

yum install ncurses-devel

Thank you all.
And, special thanks to Jani Tolonen!