dmd2 on Ubuntu

[Jonathan M Davis]

> Hello all,
> 
> It's been a while since I've worked with D, but I'm coming back to it now
> since it has 64 bit support for Windows, Linux and Mac. I'm developing on
> 64 bit Ubuntu. Here's the output of uname -a:
> 
> Linux jetty 2.6.32-31-generic #61-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 8 18:25:51 UTC 2011
> x86_64 GNU/Linux
> 
> I've done a partial installation leaving the source libraries in my user
> directory, but moving phobos and the executables to /usr/local/bin and
> /usr/lib. dmd seems to run fine. I was able to compile some old projects I
> had into libraries. Now I'm trying to build the executable to use them.
> When I issue:
> 
> dmd -ofbin/Debug/d_txtflt obj/Debug/d_txtflt.o
> ../d_libcsv/bin/Debug/libd_libcsv.a
> ../strptime/internalDate/bin/Debug/libinternalDate.a
> 
> I get /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lphobos2. Here is the contents of my
> dmd.conf file which is in /etc:
> 
> [Environment]
> 
> DFLAGS=-I/home/tarka/dmd2/src/phobos -I/home/tarka/dmd2/src/druntime/import
> -L-L/usr/lib -L--no-warn-search-mismatch -L-- export-dynamic -L-lrt
> 
> The compilation seems to work fine; it's the link that fails. When I tried
> to run ld directly with:
> 
> ld -o bin/Debug/d_txtflt obj/Debug/d_txtflt.o -l
> :../strptime/internalDate/bin/libinternalDate.a -l
> :../d_libcsv/bin/Debug/libd_libcsv.a -l
> 
> :/usr/lib/libphobos2.a -E -lrt -lc
> 
> I get a warning:
> 
> ld: warning: cannot find entry symbol _start; defaulting to
> 00000000004562d0
> 
> But it does generate output that the file commands claims is a 64 bit
> executable. The file will not run however.
> 
> Any ideas what's going on here?
> 
> Thanx
> 
> Brian

Personally, I'd advise to not even try "installing" dmd. I'd suggest that you 
simply unzip the dmd zip file somewhere in your home directory and then add 
/path/to/unzipped/dmd2/linux/bin to your PATH. That generally works great. It 
makes it incredibly easy to swap it out when a new version is released, and 
you don't really have to worry about setting it up correctly.

- Jonathan M Davis