Solaris and Linux software

[CaptainPinko]

i'm interested in trying solaris (with the educational license of course!), it says its posix compliant so software should run if just recompiled... but what can i expect to get working? k3b? xine? kde? how hard should it be? will the same binaries work or will it need to be recompiled? has anyone tried this? any wild guesses even?

[CaptainPinko]

so i can more or less count on the same software working with a recompile , even stuff that accesses the harware? nice!

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Originally posted by CaptainPinko
so i can more or less count on the same software working with a recompile , even stuff that accesses the harware? nice!

Well... maybe.

It may be a task to get many things running. If something accesses the hardware, it may be using special Linux kernel system calls, and they may not work on Solaris. Also, there can be differences between certain Solaris libraries and Linux libraries.

My suggestion: If you're going to try and compile stuff, try to keep it in /usr/local. Put all of your installed libraries into /usr/local/lib, and put all of your programs in /usr/local/bin .

Usually, you just do it by running the ./configure script as

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

[CaptainPinko]

Originally posted by Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379
If you're going to try and compile stuff, try to keep it in /usr/local. Put all of your installed libraries into /usr/local/lib, and put all of your programs in /usr/local/bin .

i'm not quite sure what you mean by "keep it in". admittedly i've done little compiling but are you suggesting i set-up a parallel set of libraries for my linux programs to use amd don't let them interact with the solaris system? now i take it that without a linux kernel linux kernel calls are doomed or can there be like a linux-solaris interface to translate?

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

By configuring --prefix=/usr/local, you tell the compiler that you want all of your files to be installed into /usr/local instead of /usr. So, a library would be in /usr/local/lib instead of going into /usr.

By doing this, you kind of segregate your "home brewed" libraries and programs from the applications that came with Solaris. The reason why I suggested it is because you never know when two different libraries may have the same name, and one would overwrite the other during an install.

But, AFAIK, a program that uses Linux specific kernel calls will not run in FreeBSD. An example I can think of is insmod. If you tried to load a Linux module into a non-Linux kernel, it would obviously not work. Certain programs that access a hardware layer directly would have the same problems, I'd assume.