Installing Glibc-2.2.5

Installation of Glibc

Before starting to install glibc, you must cd into the glibc-2.2.5 directory and unpack glibc-linuxthreads inside the glibc-2.2.5 directory, not in /usr/src as you normally would do.

This package is known to behave badly when you have changed its default optimization flags (including the -march and -mcpu options). Glibc is best left alone, so we recommend you unsetting CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS and other such variables/settings that would change the default optimization that it comes with. Also, don't pass the --enable-kernel option to the configure script. It's known to cause segmentation faults when other packages like fileutils, make and tar are linked against it.

Basically, compiling Glibc in any way than this book suggests it, is putting your system at very high risk.

Install Glibc by running the following commands:

mknod -m 0666 /dev/null c 1 3 && touch /etc/ld.so.conf && cp malloc/Makefile malloc/Makefile.backup && sed 's%\$(PERL)%/usr/bin/perl%' malloc/Makefile.backup > malloc/Makefile && cp login/Makefile login/Makefile.backup && sed 's/root/0/' login/Makefile.backup > login/Makefile && mkdir ../glibc-build && cd ../glibc-build && ../glibc-2.2.5/configure --prefix=/usr \    --enable-add-ons --libexecdir=/usr/bin && echo "cross-compiling = no" > configparms && make && make install && make localedata/install-locales && exec /bin/bash --login

An alternative to running make localedata/install-locales is to only install those locales which you need or want. This can be achieved using the localedef command. Information on this can be found in the INSTALL file in the glibc-2.2.5 tree.

During the configure stage you will see the following warning:

configure: warning: *** These auxiliary programs are missing or too old: msgfmt *** some features will be disabled. *** Check the INSTALL file for required versions.

The missing msgfmt (from the gettext package which we will install later in this chapter) is not fatal. The files msgfmt would create are already pre-built, so you won't be missing out on anything. You would only need it if you make changes to the Glibc internationalization (i18n) files. Since we don't do this by default, we can safely ignore it.

Command explanations

mknod -m 0666 /dev/null c 1 3: Glibc needs a null device to compile properly. All other devices will be created in the next section.

touch /etc/ld.so.conf One of the final steps of the Glibc installation is running ldconfig to update the dynamic loader cache. If this file doesn't exist, the installation will abort with an error that it can't read the file, so we simply create an empty file (the empty file will have Glibc default to using /lib and /usr/lib which is fine).

sed 's%\$(PERL)%/usr/bin/perl%' malloc/Makefile.backup > malloc/Makefile: This sed command searches through malloc/Makefile.backup and converts all occurrences of $(PERL) to /usr/bin/perl. The output is then written to the original malloc/Makefile.in which is used during configuration. This is done because Glibc can't autodetect perl since it hasn't been installed yet.

sed 's/root/0' login/Makefile.backup > login/Makefile: This sed command replaces all occurences of root in login/Makefile.backup with 0. This is because we don't have glibc on the LFS system yet, so usernames can't be resolved to their user id's. Therefore, we replace the username root with user id 0.

--enable-add-ons: This enables the add-on that we install with Glibc: linuxthreads

--libexecdir=/usr/bin: This will cause the pt_chown program to be installed in the /usr/bin directory.

echo "cross-compiling = no" > configparms: We do this because we are only building for our own system. Cross-compiling is used, for instance, to build a package for an Apple Power PC on an Intel system. The reason Glibc thinks we're cross-compiling is that it can't compile a test program to determine this, so it automatically defaults to a cross-compiler. Compiling the test program failes because Glibc hasn't been installed yet.

exec /bin/bash:This command will start a new bash shell which will replace the current shell. This is done to get rid of the "I have no name!" message in the command prompt, which was caused by bash's inability to resolve a userid to a username (which in turn was caused by the missing Glibc installation).

Contents of glibc-2.2.5

Dependencies

Glibc-2.2.4 needs the following to be installed:

bash: sh
binutils: ar, as, ld, ranlib
diffutils: cmp
fileutils: chmod, cp, ln, mknod, mv, mkdir, rm, touch
gcc: cpp, gcc
grep: egrep, grep
gzip: gzip
make: make
mawk: mawk
sed: sed
sh-utils: basename, expr, pwd, uname
textutils: cat, sort, tr