Perl on 3MX

[afrance]

I'm a bit of an old hacker and have a need to use Perl.

3MX comes with 5.8.8 which is fine (I might want to update to a 5.10 version later) however, there seems to be something slighly awry with it. In particular I'm trying to use the CPAN module (makes life very easy for libraries and the like).

However when I perl -MCPAN -e shell I get

a) some output regarding the locale which I am temporarily ignoring, but more worryingly...
b) a failure on importing modules because "nan" is not exported by the Opcode module

This then stops compilation.

Has anyone else come across this, or better solved it? I could rebuild perl I guess...

The other concern is that there seems to be no "make" - but that may be just that I haven't looked too hard. I have installed the gcc and tools...

[wicknix]

I never actually used perl on 3MX, however it was required for certain packages i preinstalled. If you want to hack around i'd suggest installing debian etch instead. It's not as polished as 3MX, but it is certainly usable. You can find the download link and any extra info needed to make it work here: http://linuxlaptopforum.ark2webdesign.co.uk/index.php/topic,803.msg6247.html#msg6247

Also the gcc package i put together for 3MX is very basic. Make is not included nor are any dev packages. It was mainly enough to test and build simple programs like 'hello world' etc. For a full compiler suite you'd need to install debian etch for that as well.

Cheers.

[afrance]

Thanks wicknix - I guess I may need to go down that path. However, 3MX is SO good that it's something I'd probably rather not do even if I had to build Perl myself. The problem I guess is the lack of the developer tools (and, in particular make) for gcc. Being a perl hacker (and not a gcc one) I have succeeded in building Perl using gcc from source on other systems, but really wouldn't know where to start without "make". Perl is the one thing that I need for the hackery that I have to do...

Is there any chance of "make" - or is it simple to bootstrap in some way? Or are efforts now going towards Debian Etch anyway?

Cheers

[wicknix]

Etch is now unsupported by debian due to it's age. However if you want to build binary and library compatible software to use with 3MX Ultra then yes, use debian etch. There are people using debian lenny with an unfinished 2.6 kernel (lacks some drivers yet) that's booted from an SD card leaving your installed system (3MX in your case) untouched. There is also a special kernel floating around that allows you to boot from SD card or internal NAND so you can boot 3MX or debian etch from SD card. You may want to look into that also. I forget the links, but you should be able to find all the info needed in this forum. The search utility generally gives good results.

You could also extract the files you need (as in make) from debian etch .deb files. Then just copy the contents over to 3MX. There was a script/program that automated this floating around on this forum too. Sorry for being too lazy to look the links up but i've had the flu the last few days and just don't have the energy.

So you have a few options you can look into without having to remove 3MX. Good luck.