[KLUG Members] Chicken-egg issues.

[Adam Williams]

> So, now I have Solaris 9 installed, and I figured, "Hey, what the heck, 
> lets install the whole thing". Done.  In reading the notes, however, I 
> noticed that 'compilers aren't included' in *any* of the packages.  Now 
> I'm in a hilarious chicken-egg type of thing.   I'm visiting, and 
> downloading heavily from, www.sunfreeware.com, and I've downloaded gcc, 
> automake, autoconf, make, and other tools, and I'm starting to get 
> annoyed.  GCC needs GCC to compile, Make needs Make to make, make needs 
> autoconf, which needs autoconf, which needs automake, which needs 'ar' 
> (what the heck?).  

You could build the packages on a Linux box.

> Yes, I've noticed they provide binaries - which is what I'm slowly 
> getting, one by one (I'd rather have custom compiled versions).  However, 
> is there in existence a group of packages or CD I can get which will 
> have  all these, which if I do something like 'make all' will go through 
> all of them and install them?  I'm getting annoyed here; I have the 
> feeling that before I get my system running with a compiler I'll have 
> downloaded just about everything from this site.   

Your experiencing one of the reasons Linux is trouncing commericial
UNIXs.  Whether you like .rpm or .deb, either one is so far superioir to
the package management available on commericial UNIXs it isn't event a
real comparison.

And something like rhn or red-carpet for an OS like AIX or Solaris? 
Hah!  Not in this life-time.

And if you think RH9's glibc is hacked up, wait till you try building
PAM/NSS modules or Samba 3 on Solaris.......  Want URLs to the horror
stories?  I might be able to dig them up.

> (I know that there are versions of linux for sparc, but I'd like to play
> with solaris a while and use it as a workstation. You know,nerd factor
> type of stuff.)

Sure, I understand the why.  Sort of like the "cool" factor in high
school when I drove an MG convertable.  Never mind the fact I was always
wet when it rained and light blue all winter.