snort installation not going well...

So i'm trying to install snort and ran into a few problems, heres the whole story...

i downloaded snort-2.3.0.tar.gz from www.snort.org using lynx and issued the command tar -zxvf snort-2.3.0.tar.gz and all seemed to go well, so i went into the new snort dir and did a ./configure. I believe at this point it said I need libpcap, so I went out and downloaded, maked, make installed and make cleaned. so i started the configure agian and it said that i need pcre, so i went out and did the same with that and then i was able to configure and make snort and it seemed finish fine (atleast i didnt see any errors). So I try to start snort and it says "snort: error while loading shared libraries: libpcre.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

so, being one of the first things i've had to install manually i'm at a stand still...does anyone know what the next step would be?

Thanks for any help.

hi,
Try doing this.
1) open /etc/ld.so.conf with an editor.
2) see if /usr/local/lib is there in it. If not add this entry.
3) Save the file with the changes and type ldconfig on the bash prompt.
4) Try running snort now and let me know if it works

Awesome, you are a king among men,

thank you so much. Now I just need to know how to use it...




Also what does the ld.so.conf file do?