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7. Troubleshooting

If xmkmf and/or make succeeded without errors, you may proceed to the next section. However, in "real life", few things work right the first time. This is when your resourcefulness is put to the test.

7.1 Link Errors

7.2 Other Problems

7.3 Tweaking and fine tuning

You may wish to examine the Makefile to make certain that the best compilation options for your system are invoked. For example, setting the -O2 flag chooses the highest level of optimization and the -fomit-frame-pointer flag results in a smaller binary (though debugging will then be disabled). Do not play around with this unless you know what you are doing, and in any case, not until after a trial build works.

7.4 Where to go for more help

In my experience, perhaps 25% of applications build "right out of the box". Another 50% or so can be "persuaded" to build with an effort ranging from trivial to herculean. That still means a significant number of packages will not build no matter what. Even then, the Intel ELF and/or a.out binaries for these might possibly be found at Sunsite or the TSX-11 archive. Red Hat and Debian have extensive archives of prepackaged binaries of most of the popular Linux software. Perhaps the author of the software can supply the binaries compiled for your particular flavor of machine.

Note that if you obtain precompiled binaries, you will need to check for compatibility with your system:

If all else fails, you may find help in the appropriate newsgroups, such as comp.os.linux.x or comp.os.linux.development.

If nothing at all works, at least you gave it your best effort, and you learned a lot.


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