Linux: How to statically link against system libs?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> wrote in message 
news:iq2g72$ngp$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> Aggghhhh!!! God damnnit, I officially fucking hate linux now... (not that 
> I'm a win, mac or bsd fan, but whatever...)
>
> I temporarily gave up trying to actually get ahold of an old distro, so I 
> tried the other angles (not counting just simply *wishing* it was like win 
> and I could just copy the damn binary over to another linux box...nooo, 
> that would be too simple for a unix-style system):
>
> I got my web host to switch me to a server that has 32-bit libs installed 
> (a pain in and of itself because I had to coordinate with a client to find 
> a convenient downtime, and then I ended up needing to change my domain's 
> DNS entires, so now my whole domain's down for a couple days)...And it 
> make no difference. So I guess in my particular case it wasn't a 
> 32-bit/64-bit issue at all (or maybe there still would have been that 
> problem too, I dunno).
>
> So I went to try uClibc:
>
> I started my Linux box...and it decides to hang mid-startup. So I reboot 
> and at least this time the dumb thing finishes booting (I had problems 
> with linux randomly breaking for no apperent reason ten years ago with 
> Mandrake and Red Hat. I can't believe it's still happening now).
>
> Anyway, at the uClibc site, I saw the "simple steps" here: 
> http://uclibc.org/toolchains.html and thought "Uhh, hell no, not if I 
> don't have to" and went to the link for the pre-built verison instead. The 
> link was broken. Then the page says those are really old versions anyway. 
> Great :/
>
> So I go through the steps: I get to the part where I download buildroot. 
> Copy/paste the link over to my linux box...and discover that Synergy+ has 
> suddenly decided it no longer feels like offering the "shared clipboard" 
> feature that always worked before.
>
> Ok, so I type the URL into my linux box manually, download buildroot, 
> unpack it...so far so good...and follow the instruction to run "make 
> menuconfig"...BARF. It fails with some error about ncurses being missing, 
> and that I should get ncurses-devel. "sudo apt-get install ncurses-devel": 
> Can't find package. "sudo apt-get install ncurses": Can't find package. 
> "sudo apt-get install fuck-shit-cock": Can't find package.
>
> Google "ncurses deb package". Actually found it. Download. Run...You ready 
> for this? Here's the message: "Error: A later version is already 
> installed." SERIOUSLY?!
>
> This is the point where I would normally say "fuck this shit", but the 
> thought of continuing to use PHP (even if it is via Haxe) is enough to 
> keep me bashing my head against this wall. Next stop: See if I can get 
> ahold of *some* version of CentOS and see if using that in a VM will 
> manage to work. (And rip Kubuntu off my Linux box and see if I can replace 
> it with Debian+XFCE. How is it possible that GNOME and KDE were both 
> fairly ok ten years ago, at least as far as I can remember, but the latest 
> versions of both are complete shit? And then there's that iOS garbage that 
> Ubuntu is moving to now (The one main thing I've always disliked about 
> Ubuntu is their incompresensible Apple-envy, which only seems to be 
> increasing). And fuck, the latest KDE actually makes the Win7 UI seem good 
> (at least the Win7 UI actually *works* and has some semblance of 
> consistency, even as obnoxious as it is), and I could have sworn that KDE 
> never used to be so completely broken before. Or broken at all, for that 
> matter. Which is too bad, because Dolphin actually shows some promise...at 
> least when it isn't doing the 
> random-horizontal-scrolling-for-no-apparent-reason dance.)
>

Yay! I've just had some success! I managed to find this:

http://vault.centos.org/

Which has all the CentOS ISOs. (You'd think I would have had an easier time 
finding that URL...)

I downloaded 4.2 (picked pretty much at random), installed it in VirtualBox, 
compiled a trivial test C program in the included GCC, uploaded that to the 
server, and it worked! :)

Next step: Install DMD on this CentOS VM and try for a D cgi...

And then later, I may try 4.7, see if that'll work for me too. And I still 
have another web host I need to get CGI working on (although that one has 
some pretty bad support, so I'm a little nervous about that). But it's 
looking good so far. Finegrs crossed...

I'd be nice to not have to use a VM to compile, of course. But as long as I 
can I have some way to do my server-side web stuff in D, and *completely* 
sidestep the entire PHP runtime, then it'll certainly still be well worth 
it.