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Installing the C Library

To install the library and its header files, and the Info files of the manual, type make install. This will build things if necessary, before installing them. Don't rely on that; compile everything first. If you are installing glibc as your primary C library, we recommend you shut the system down to single-user mode first, and reboot afterward. This minimizes the risk of breaking things when the library changes out from underneath.

If you are upgrading from a previous installation of glibc 2.0 or 2.1, `make install' will do the entire job. If you're upgrading from Linux libc5 or some other C library, you need to rename the old `/usr/include' directory out of the way first, or you will end up with a mixture of header files from both libraries, and you won't be able to compile anything. You may also need to reconfigure GCC to work with the new library. The easiest way to do that is to figure out the compiler switches to make it work again (`-Wl,-dynamic-linker=/lib/ld-linux.so.2' should work on Linux systems) and use them to recompile gcc. You can also edit the specs file (`/usr/lib/gcc-lib/TARGET/VERSION/specs'), but that is a bit of a black art.

You can install glibc somewhere other than where you configured it to go by setting the install_root variable on the command line for `make install'. The value of this variable is prepended to all the paths for installation. This is useful when setting up a chroot environment or preparing a binary distribution.

Glibc 2.1 includes two daemons, nscd and utmpd, which you may or may not want to run. nscd caches name service lookups; it can dramatically improve performance with NIS+, and may help with DNS as well. utmpd allows programs that use the old format for the `utmp' file to coexist with new programs. For more information see the files `nscd/README' and `login/README.utmpd'.

One auxiliary program, `/usr/libexec/pt_chown', is installed setuid root. This program is invoked by the grantpt function; it sets the permissions on a pseudoterminal so it can be used by the calling process. This means programs like xterm and screen do not have to be setuid to get a pty. (There may be other reasons why they need privileges.) If you are using a 2.1 or newer Linux kernel with the devptsfs or devfs filesystems providing pty slaves, you don't need this program; otherwise you do. The source for `pt_chown' is in `login/programs/pt_chown.c'.


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