MySQL requires libc 5.4.12 or newer. It is known to work with libc 5.4.46. glibc 2.0.6 and later should also work. There have been some problems with the glibc RPMs from Red Hat, so if you have problems, check whether there are any updates. The glibc 2.0.7-19 and 2.0.7-29 RPMs are known to work.

If you are using Red Hat 8.0 or a new glibc 2.2.x library, you may see mysqld die in gethostbyaddr(). This happens because the new glibc library requires a stack size greater than 128KB for this call. To fix the problem, start mysqld with the --thread-stack=192K option. This stack size is the default on MySQL 4.0.10 and above, so you should not see the problem.

If you are using gcc 3.0 and above to compile MySQL, you must install the libstdc++v3 library before compiling MySQL; if you do not do this, you get an error about a missing __cxa_pure_virtual symbol during linking.

On some older Linux distributions, configure may produce an error like this:

Syntax error in sched.h. Change _P to __P in the
/usr/include/sched.h file.
See the Installation chapter in the Reference Manual.

Just do what the error message says. Add an extra underscore to the _P macro name that has only one underscore, and then try again.

You may get some warnings when compiling. Those shown here can be ignored:

mysqld.cc -o objs-thread/mysqld.o
mysqld.cc: In function `void init_signals()':
mysqld.cc:315: warning: assignment of negative value `-1' to
`long unsigned int'
mysqld.cc: In function `void * signal_hand(void *)':
mysqld.cc:346: warning: assignment of negative value `-1' to
`long unsigned int'

If mysqld always dumps core when it starts, the problem may be that you have an old /lib/libc.a. Try renaming it, and then remove sql/mysqld and do a new make install and try again. This problem has been reported on some Slackware installations.

If you get the following error when linking mysqld, it means that your libg++.a is not installed correctly:

/usr/lib/libc.a(putc.o): In function `_IO_putc':
putc.o(.text+0x0): multiple definition of `_IO_putc'

You can avoid using libg++.a by running configure like this:

shell> CXX=gcc ./configure

If mysqld crashes immediately and you are running Red Hat 5.0 with a version of glibc older than 2.0.7-5, you should make sure that you have installed all glibc patches. There is a lot of information about this in the MySQL mail archives, available online at http://lists.mysql.com/.