[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I get this when attempting to compile on a reasonably clean, 
> reasonably recent Slackware 7.x system...

Did you download fresh source, and run "configure" on it?

If not, download fresh source, run "configure", saving the output to a
file, and send that file to "ethereal-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxx".

If so, do "make distclean", and then run "configure" again, saving the
output to a file, and send that file back to
"ethereal-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxx".

Along with the output of "configure", also send the output of the
command

	find . -name config.h -print | xargs egrep LIBZ /dev/null

Ethereal's configure scripts are supposed to check to see whether the
system on which it's being run has a zlib that includes "gzgets()" and,
if not (i.e., if the system either doesn't have zlib or the zlib that
comes with the system doesn't have "gzgets()", it should completely
disable all support for reading compressed files (as the system doesn't
offer sufficient support to allow Ethereal to read compressed files).

So either

	1) there's some configure script bug

or

	2) there's something wrong with your system so that the
	   configure script checks cannot (no matter how bug-free they
	   are) reliably determine whether the system has a zlib with
	   gzgets (a system with two separate versions of zlib might be
	   such a system).