Unable to get PIL to load jpeg images

[peter.mosley at talk21.com]

Thanks for that tip

Following a dialogue in that discussion group it is now working.  The
problem was that I didn't have the right jpeg library installed
(although what I had was enough to show jpegs in gThumb, GIMP and the
Gnome and KDE desktops so I don't understand why it wasn't). I had to
also install a jpeg development library, which fortunately was
available on my Fedora Core 3 installation disc.

A final glitch was that the previous broken build interfered with the
linking of PIL to the libraries.  I went for overkill, and deleted all
the PIL installation and site-packages directories, then reinstalled
from the original tarball.  This gave a curious glitch, in that the
first time I ran it it failed to load Tkinter with some obscure error
message, but on a retry everything was fine.  This worries me slightly,
as I don't know what happened and there is always a chance it could
happen again, but until it does I can't investigate it.

Slightly off topic, but I think my experience here is typical of any
installation on a Linux system, and illustrates why, despite huge
improvements over the last few years, Linux is not yet really suitable
for non expert use.

Thanks to everyone who's helped me over the last few months.

Peter