Glibc installation Before starting to install Glibc, you must cd into the glibc-&glibc-version; directory and unpack Glibc-linuxthreads in that directory, not in /usr/src as you would normally do. This package is known to behave badly when you have changed its default optimization flags (including the -march and -mcpu options). Therefore, if you have defined any environment variables that override default optimizations, such as CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, we recommend unsetting them when building Glibc. Basically, compiling Glibc in any other way than the book suggests is putting your system at a very high risk. The documentation that comes with Glibc recommends to build the package not in the source directory but in a separate, dedicated directory: mkdir ../glibc-build && cd ../glibc-build Next, prepare Glibc to be compiled: CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe" \     ../glibc-&glibc-version;/configure --prefix=/stage1 \     --disable-profile --enable-add-ons \     --with-headers=/stage1/include \     --with-binutils=/stage1/bin \     --without-gd The meaning of the configure options are: --disable-profile: This disables the building of the libraries with profiling information. Omit this option if you plan to do profiling. --enable-add-ons: This enables any add-ons that we installed with Glibc, in our case Linuxthreads. --libexecdir=/usr/bin: This will cause the pt_chown program to be installed in the /usr/bin directory. During this 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 program (from the Gettext package, which we'll install later) won't cause any problems. The msgfmt is used to generate the binary translation files that can make your system talk in a different language. Because these translation files have already been generated for you, there is no need for msgfmt. You'd only need the program if you change the translation source files (the *.po files in the po subdirectory), which would require you to regenerate the binary files. Continue with compiling the package: make make check make install The locales (used by Glibc to make your Linux system talk in a different language) weren't installed when you ran the previous command, so we have to do that ourselves now: make localedata/install-locales An alternative to running the previous command is to install only 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-&glibc-version; tree.