Installer 20060825 on Fedora Core 4 install notes

The latest CD installer will work fine on Fedora Core 4. All gEDA Suite programs now compile happily with gcc-4.X. When you build your FC4 system, make sure you select “devlopement worstation” as your system type, and include as many -devel packages into the build as you can. The following packages are particularly important:

If you are missing most of these -devel packages, the installer will do the right thing, but it's better to pre-install them so the installer doesn't have to become root to do it.

Installer 2005080X on Fedora Core 4 install notes

Prerequisites:

When you install FC4, make sure you install the “workstation” version, and not the “desktop” version. (You are presented with this choice when you first install the distribution off of the distribution media.) The “workstation” version includes important header files and other tools which are necessary to build many components of the gEDA Suite using the installer.

Also, the following additional RPMs are required:

These RPMs are not automatically installed by RedHat’s installer; you need to install them manually. The devel packages live on the 4th FC4 disk. The gcc compatability compiler lives on the 3rd FC4 disk. Install all these packages before trying to build the gEDA Suite.

Before installing the gEDA Suite on an FC4 system, you should set the CC environment variable to point to gcc32. This is explained further in the “Problems” section below.

Problems:

The 200508XX installer will fail on FC4 systems. There seem to be several independent problems:

  1. The installer doesn’t find guile, even though it comes pre-installed on the platform.
    The problem here is that the installer tries to find guile by issuing the “guile-config” command. This command lives in the guile-devel RPM which is not installed by default (see above). To fix the problem, install the guile-devel RPM which lives on the FC4 install CD no. 4.
  2. The installer doesn’t find gettext, even though it comes pre-installed on the platform. Gettext is used by gschem, so this error is raised during the configure stage for gschem.
    Again, the gettext header files live in the gettext-devel RPM which is not installed by default (see above). To fix this problem, install the gettext-devel RPM which lives on the FC4 install CD no. 4.
  3. Many different applications (e.g. GTKWave, GSpiceUI, Icarus Verilog) fail during compilation. The error message typically says something about a problem involving a “type”.

This problem obtains because FC4 incorporates the new gcc-4.0 compiler. Gcc-4.0 incorporates much stricter type checking than the older gcc versions. This has caused many open-source applications to fail to compile.

Fortunately, RedHat still provides the older version of gcc on the FC4 disks. This version of gcc is called “gcc32”. It is not installed as part of the normal installation, so you must install it yourself. The RPM lives on the FC4 install media, disk 3, and is called “compat-gcc-32-3.2.3-47.fc4.i386.rpm”. Allow rpm to install any dependencies it finds.

A similar situation holds for the C++ compiler g++. You need to install the older version too; get it on the FC4 disk 4. It is called “compat-gcc-32-c++-3.2.3-47.fc4.i386.rpm”. Also install any dependencies found by rpm when you install these pacakges.

Once they are installed, set the gcc environment variables as follows:

for bash: 

export CC=gcc32
export CXX=g++32

for csh: 

setenv CC gcc32
setenv CXX g++32

and then run the installer. Make sure you run the installer from the same window as where you set the CC environment variable!