Error when installing Makefile: “make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop.”

Question

In short while I run the make command it says:

nir@nir:~/Downloads/xf86-video-intel-2.17.0$ make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.

I looked inside the folder-xf86-video-intel-2.17.0 and there is a file named "Makefile.in" it supposed to be a in file, right?

Answer 1

That happens because there is no file named Makefile in that directory. To create that Makefile, you need to execute

$ ./configure

The configure script determines if your system has all the dependencies necessary to compile the application. If a dependency is not found, the configure will fail and the Makefile's will not be created. To solve that, you must install all the dependencies needed by the application.

The application xf86-video-intel seems to be provided by the xserver-xorg-video-intel package, and its dependencies may be easily installed by running

$ sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-video-intel

For more information, you might want to read the README or INSTALL files.

Answer 2

The make command looks for a file called "Makefile", no extension, not "Makefile.in". Since the file is not found, make does not know what to do, and stops. (The error message is cryptic because in some rare cases, make can guess what to do without an actual Makefile.)

Read the instructions on how to compile your program. It's likely that you are required to run ./configure, first. This script will create "Makefile" based on your setup and "Makefile.in".

You can temporarily disable the Hebrew locale when looking for help online, just run

LC_ALL=C make

This will give you English messages.

Answer 3

Just remember that in order for the ./configure file to run you made need a compiler. So do something like sudo apt-get install gcc. then run ./configure again and should work