The libmediaart library is the foundation for media art caching, extraction and lookup for applications on the desktop. To compile applications using libmediaart, you need to tell the compiler where to find the proper header files and libraries. This is done with the pkg-config utility. The following interactive shell session demonstrates how pkg-config is used (the actual output on your system may be different): $ pkg-config --cflags libmediaart-0.2 $ pkg-config --libs libmediaart-0.2 The simplest way to compile a program is to use the "backticks" feature of the shell. If you enclose a command in backticks (not single quotes), then its output will be substituted into the command line before execution: $ cc `pkg-config --cflags --libs libmediaart-0.2` hello.c -o hello