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6. Glibc

Next we want to install init, but like almost every program that runs under Linux, init uses library functions provided by the GNU C library, glibc. So we will install that first.

Glibc is a very large and complicated package. It took 90 hours to build on my old 386sx/16 with 8M RAM. But it only took 33 minutes on my Celeron 433 with 64M. I think memory is the main issue here. If you only have 8M of RAM (or, shudder, less!) be prepared for a long build.

The glibc install documentation recommends building in a separate directory. This enables you to start again easily, by just blowing that directory away. You might also want to do that to save yourself about 265M of disk space!

Unpack the glibc-2.1.3.tar.gz (or whatever version) tarball into /mnt/target/usr/src as usual. Now, we need to unpack the ``add-ons'' into glibc's directory. So cd glibc-2.1.3, and then unpack the glibc-crypt-2.1.3.tar.gz and glibc-linuxthreads-2.1.3.tar.gz tarballs there.

Now we can create the build directory, configure, make and install glibc. These are the commands I used, but read the documentation yourself and make sure you do what is best for your circumstances. Before you do though, you might want to do a df command to see how much free space you have. You can do another after you've built and installed glibc, to see what a space-hog it is.

        cd ..
        mkdir glibc-build
        ../glibc-2.1.3/configure --enable-add-ons --prefix=/usr
        make
        make install_root=/mnt/target install

Notice that we have yet another way of telling a package where to install.


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