I figured my thumbdrive distro (KNOPPIX) would be the best place to have a utility to recover any files I might accidentally delete from my ext4 partitions.

But, I get unresolved dependencies related to e2fs when I try to install it. I checked with dumpe2fs and I have the version needed according to the extundelte website.

<rant>Why is is SO EXTREMELY HARD to install ANYTHING??? If you download the source, you have to go through the whole makefile mess which requires (among other things) a bunch of packages which aren't in the repos, or you can try the package route and end up with unresolved dependencies! </rant>

Is there a guide anywhere on how to actually get stuff other people wrote to compile in Linux?