Monday 29 August 2005

Hello Solaris, I'm pgAdmin III....

For a while now we've had anecdotal reports of people compiling and running pgAdmin III on Solaris systems, a few successfully and a few unfortunately not. I was recently given the use of a Sparc box running Solaris 10 and asked to sort things out properly, so being the eager-to-please kind of chap that I am decided to do just that. The owner of the box had tried numerous combinations of configure options for wxWidgets (the cross platform API pgAdmin is built on), but had only managed to build an executable that crashed whenever a modal dialogue was closed.

So, after some investigation by myself and Andreas Pflug, I produced a reproduceable test case of the problem using the wxWidgets 'dialogs' sample, and emailled it to the wx developers list, along with details of some linking problems I'd also found. After some discussion, and speculation that the problems might have been caused by GTK being compiled by Sun's compiler and everything else by GNU's GCC, the problem was solved by Mike Wetherell, who committed a fix to the wxWidgets CVS, along with further fixes to resolve the linking issues.

So, using a wxWidgets snapshot, coupled with the latest pgAdmin snapshot (containing a couple of other compilation and linking fixes), pgAdmin sprang to life both on the Sparc box, and the x86 Solaris box I built in the office :-)

'Enough of the yacking' I hear you cry, and 'how do I build it then'? Well, simple - here's what I installed:


PostgreSQL 8.0.3 configured with:

./configure --enable-thread-safety --with-openssl --without-readline

wxWidgets CVS snapshot from 2005-09-26 (or later, use the 'All' version) configured with:

./configure --with-gtk --enable-gtk2 --enable-unicode --enable-mimetype=no

pgAdmin SVN snapshot from 2005-09-27 (or later), configured with:

./configure

There you have it - enjoy :-)