Subject: last 1.1 upgrade problem fixed with NAG FORTRAN

From: "James D. Freels" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 96 14:06 EDT

Dear Debian-Linux colleagues:

A few days ago, I had mentioned in this newsgroup a problem I was
having with using my commercial license of NAG Fortran on the new
Debian 1.1 upgrade.  I wish to report here the fix to the problem.

As one might expect, the problem is due to Debian 1.1 being an all-elf
installation while earlier versions were either all-aout or
mixed-aout-elf.  It turns out that my system was mixed, and already
had the old libc4 libraries loaded.  Since my version of NAG is an
a.out system, I had originally thought that I needed to specifically
point the compiler to the a.out libraries on my system.

However, as it turned out, the compiler needed the a.out version of
the gcc compiler.  More specifically, the NAG compiler looks for a
hard-coded /usr/bin/gcc to execute.  I simply had to create a symlink

ln -s /usr/i486-linuxaout/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc

after renaming /usr/bin/gcc to /usr/bin/gcc.elf, and my normal NAG
compile commands will work.  The Debian 1.1 conveniently makes
available several of the old a.out packages under the
/usr/i486-linuxaout tree.

If someone can dream up a more intelligent way of pointing apps
between gcc(aout) and gcc(elf), I would appreciate it.  As it stands
now, I will have to manually change gcc each time I want to use NAG
FORTRAN and an elf-binary build. 

Incidently, the NAG folks told me I had to purchase an elf-upgrade of the
compiler to get it to work on my system.  Since my kernel is now built
to run both elf and aout executables, that is not the case.

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