Software ports for Linux/390

Configure Problems

To cleanly port anything with a configure script, you will want to apply this patch to config.guess and config.sub. In the directory that contains config.guess and config.sub:
patch -p1 < pathname-of-config.patch

If that fails, you should try the patch for older autoconf scripts and see whether that works.

I have written a tool, patchconf.pl, to apply the patch recursively within a directory hierarchy. Its syntax is
patchconf.pl patch-file-name [dir ...]

If no directory is given, it works from the current directory downward.

It is quite possible that neither of these patches will work. There are a near-infinite number of configure script variations out there. What you want to do is actually fairly simple.

• config.guess tries to determine your machine type. It does this by parsing the output of uname. In short, you look for "s390" and return "s390-ibm-linux".
• config.sub uses that information to return the canonical system name. In older configuration scripts, this is a 3-part name, which is also "s390-ibm-linux". More recent scripts return a four-part name, which should be "s390-ibm-linux-gnu".
• Even if they won't apply cleanly, the patch files are a good starting point for fixing your own configure scripts.

In general, configure wants to give you CFLAGS of -g -O2. Optimization level 2 is currently broken under Linux/390, so you should specify CFLAGS=-O1 on your make command line.

This can be made trickier if CFLAGS itself is more complex; in general, replace -Ox, where x > 1, with -O1.
sed -e 's/\-O[2-9]/\-O1/g' run over the Makefile will do the trick.

Ported software

So far, I have patches for the following packages to build them under the IBM flavor of Linux/390.

• OpenSSL 0.9.4. Works out of the box after applying the patch.
  
• OpenSSL 0.9.5.
  You might want to ln -s /usr/local/ssl/include/openssl/* /usr/local/ssl/include after installing.

• SSH 1.2.27. This one is a little trickier; after applying the older config patch in both the ssh directory and its gmp-2.0.2-ssh-2 subdirectory (perhaps with patchconf.pl, do
  ./configure && make CFLAGS="-O1 -D_GNU_SOURCE" && make install

• Big Brother 1.3a. Change -O3 in the makefile to -O1; you may need to define alternate locations for executables in etc/bbsys.local as well.

• Lynx 2.8.2 (optionally with SSL). Apply the config patch, then run
  cp makefile makefile.orig && sed -e 's/\-O2/\-O1/g' < makefile.orig > makefile
  and it builds out of the box. If you use the SSL patches, you will want to create symlinks in /usr/local/ssl/include as outlined above.

• Emacs 20.5a. In the top-level directory,
  chmod +w config.sub config.guess configure configure.in
  Then apply the patch, and it builds trivially:
  ./configure && make && make install

• NcFTP 3.0b21 Builds out of the box. No changes necessary.

• PGP 5.0i Builds out of the box. No changes necessary.

• Cron-3.0.1 Builds out of the box; you may want to enable optimization and specify gcc in the Makefile.

• VNC-3.3.3r1. In the top-level directory,
  chmod +w Xvnc/config/imake/imakemdep.h Xvnc/config/cf/Imake.cf Xvnc/config/cf/linux.cf
  Then apply this patch. In the top-level directory,
  xmkmf && make Makefiles && make
  That builds everything but the server. Then:
  cd Xvnc && make World
  That should build the Xvnc server. Then
  cd .. && ./vncinstall installdir
  (I used /usr/local/bin). I think these patches are just about what would be required to get Imake working 100% correctly on Linux/390; that's still unconfirmed.
  Something is still wrong with the VNC tile encoding; I'm trying to work it out.

• PostgreSQL 6.5.3. Apply the patch and follow the lengthy build and installation procedure.

• C-Kermit 7.0. Builds without modification.

• CU sudo-1.6.2p1. Builds without modification. Thanks to Bob Shair for these two.

• INN 2.2.2. David Boyes reports that INN 2.2.2 builds and runs with only the usual config.guess and config.sub patches.

• Hercules 1.50. Hercules itself works, but it tickles a bug in L/390's select() implementation: select() does not correctly set errno. This is being worked on. Until it is fixed, use this patch.
  Hercules is still mostly untested. I will update this page when I have MVT running correctly underneath Hercules on the S/390.
  However, even if MVT doesn't boot yet,Linux/390 does. Go here.

• XDoom 20000305. I've run out of disk space to generate patch sets. In essence, to build xdoom, you copy the Linux/PPC (another 32-bit big-endian processor) configuration.

• MesaLib 3.1. Fix config.sub and config.guess. Neither of the patches works, but you can use the newer patch as a guide. After that it builds and installs without incident.