How to use a never library on Ubuntu 12.04

Question

I run Ubuntu 12.04 on my laptop and I have originally installed libxcb version 1.8.1 from package, but I need a newer version, because I need it to use the new mesa.

I have compiled it from git with

--prefix /usr

and now I have duplicate files. The old ones are in

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu

and the new ones under

/usr/lib

The problem is, if I try to compile mesa, the compiler founds only the old version of xcb. If I try to remove it with apt-get it wants to remove the whole X, I think. (A lot of xserver-xorg packages.)

I have tried to do according these guide.

How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

Don't worry about the version you installed yourself, you can just simply remove the folder.

How to get to another version, then?

I'd try apt-pinning for installing the package from another source.

There will be a newer package in a PPA or even in another Ubuntu version and with apt-pinning you can make them available.

It has it's limitations, though.

Here you can read more about it.

But please be careful. Especially updating libc6 to a newer version will break your whole system. It happenend to me, too. So make sure that you don't update the main lib of the system, or that libc6 is not part of the updated packages.

I will also post another link, where different "ways" of installing are presented. Take a look here.

But apart from that little flaw apt-pinning works awesome.