Running Sage on Sun's Solaris operating system.

This page, which is primarily maintained by David Kirkby, describes the current status of Sage on the various versions (Solaris 10 and Open Solaris) and on various hardware (SPARC and x86).

Sage will build on Sun's Solaris operating system - you can in fact try out Sage running on a Sun T5240 Coolthreads server, kindly donated by Sun Microsystems, at http://t2nb.math.washington.edu:8000/

Solaris 10 on SPARC hardware.

Sage 4.3 or later should build and run on any SPARC hardware which runs Solaris 10. Sage has been built on several Solaris 10 SPARC systems, ranging from old machines to current models and from the first release of Solaris 10 (03/2005 edition) to the latest (05/2009 edition). So Sage should build on your Solaris 10 SPARC machine. Specific hardware/software combinations on which Sage has been built are

Sage will run in a Solaris zone, so if you want to make a public access server, with negligible security risks, then you can do so.

There are a few problems with the build on Solaris 10, all of which we hope to resolve.

Solaris 10 on x86 hardware.

This has not been tested, but would have a high probability of working. Let us know if you try it.

Open Solaris (also known as Solaris 11) on SPARC hardware

This has not been tested and will almost certainly not work.

We are afraid to say, nobody currently developing Sage uses Open Solaris on SPARC hardware. Given the number of users of Open Solaris on SPARC hardware is so small, it is doubtful much effort will be put into a port. But if others wish to submit patches, they can do.

Open Solaris (also known as Solaris 11) on x86 hardware

Unfortunately, as of December 2009, the latest release of Sage will not build on Open Solaris. We are actively working on resolving this.

How to build Sage on Solaris 10 with SPARC hardware

As stated above, this should work, but the process is not as simple as one might like it to be.

Stage `1 - make sure you have a suitable gcc, if not build one or download one

Sage has been built with gcc 4.4.1 and 4.4.2, but should work with any gcc >= 4.0.1 that

Solaris 10 only ships with an old version of gcc (3.4.3), which is not built with Fortran support. Sage needs a newer version of gcc than that, and it must be configured to support Fortran. (I believe the binary from Sunfreeware does not support Fortran). If you do not have gcc >= 4.0.1 with Fortran support, you will need to:

Older releases of Solaris 10 ship with a pretty broken gcc in /usr/sfw/bin. You might need to apply patch 123647 on old releases. Exactly how old, and what version of the patch is not know, but anything released in mid-2008 should be fine.

It is highly reccomended that you configure gcc to use both the Sun linker and Sun assembler. A configuration which is known to work is:

Stage 2 Set up a build environment.

Set up your An issue with MPIR not detecting the correct linker has been seen on one computer running the November 2008 edition of Open Solaris, yet others running the same version have not had this problem.