To provide another data point I thought I would chime in with
our experience. I built version 2.36 using gcc version 2.95.3
and gdbm 1.8.0 on Solaris 2.8. I ran into several problems but was
able to do it in a couple of days working on and off. I thought
(and still think) that the problems were due to the fact that the
Greenstone team has little or no access to Solaris machines and
until and unless someone either provided them with access or
volunteered to test and fix build code on Solaris, this would be
expected.

After seeing Ziying's message I decided it was time to try 2.37 and
see if the problems were still there. They are...with a couple of
new ones thrown in. But again, I was able to build it in a few hours
of my time spread over two days and have the demo collection up and
running on it now. I can't address many of the issues that were
brought up since, for example, I don't use 'deploy' and I don't use
the web administration interface (assuming that's where the password
issues come in?). On the other hand, I'm not a professional Unix
systems administrator either and it's likely (almost certain) that
some of the problems I encountered are due to my poor understanding
of my Solaris environment.

With all those caveats (ie. your mileage will vary), here are the
problems I encountered and solutions that worked for me...in hopes
they may help others trying to use Greenstone on Solaris.

1. The first problem I encountered the first time I built was the
gdbm dependency. I had to get that package and install it. The
configure script still couldn't find it, even with the
--with-gdbm=/usr/local option. This was resolved by modifying
the configure script to change 'test -e' to 'test -r' as suggested
by John McPherson on the greenstone list.

2. Once the build started I had the problem Ziying described where
the CC variable was not passed down to the Makefiles in the src
directories. I resolved this by exporting
CC=gcc
CPP=g++
in my own environment before running 'make'

3. This worked for all the src directories but I got the same message
(something about a cc option not available) for the new XML parser
package added in 2.37. Luckily I had already installed this perl
module and so I took it out of the packages/Makefile. (I also had
to make sure my installation was in the INC path used by various
GSDL scripts like import.pl.)

4. After a lengthy compile, the 'make' finished successfully and so I
tried 'make install'. This failed miserably in the src/recpt
directory with complaints about message catalogs not found and then:
install: library was not found anywhere!
Since I don't know any better...and since I have a Linux binary
distribution installed to compare against...I decided to just
manually move all the executables to bin/SunOS. This was painful
but appears to have worked ok.

5. I then configured GSDL in my web server and invoked the library
CGI. Got an internal server error. The apache log indicated
that the gdbm shared library was not found, so I moved library
to library.exe and created a shell script named library as a
wrapper around the CGI:
#!/bin/sh
# GSDL cgi-bin/library requires gdbm & stdc++ libs in /usr/local/lib:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
/usr/local/gsdl/cgi-bin/library.exe
I also had this problem when I ran one of the Perl scripts so I
also added the export command to setup.bash.

6. That allowed me to run the library CGI which then politely complained
about the unconfigured gsdlsite.cfg script in cgi-bin. Editing that
was straight-forward and allowed me to bring up Administration on the
web, which reminded me that I need to import and build demo before it
is "running", so I ran the import.pl and buildcol.pl scripts (which
didn't work until I linked my XML parser into INC and set my library
search path as described above). And, Viola...I all the snail info
I need on Solaris 2.8.

Perhaps this provides some hope for anyone who might be scared off
Greenstone on Solaris by the previous posting, and might provide some
help with specific problems. If you want to see it in action, here
is a collection using Greenstone 2.36 on a Solaris 2.8 server:
http://test.aladin.wrlc.org/gsdl/cgi-bin/library?c=vacw&p=about

-Don Gourley