In regards to building the source distribution of MySQL on a Solaris/Intel system (i.e. Solaris 8 for Intel), I have successfully 'built' and installed MySQL 3.23.40, and found the following tasks need to be performed: As Phil Dibowitz stated: You need to have your LD_LIBRARY_PATH set. For the SFW packages make sure /opt/sfw/lib is in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH (and I'm not quite sure what it is for the sunfreeware.com versions, probably /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib). I got my "gcc" (version 2.95.3) from www.sunfreeware.com, so I set my "LD_LIBRARY_PATH" to "/usr/local/lib" export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib I also downloaded and installed the following packages from http://www.sunfreeware.com (besides the "gcc-2.95.3" package): Gnu "tar-1.1.3" (so you can 'uncompress' the MySQL source package while you unpack it...) "make-3.78" "autoconf-2.13" "automake-1.4" The 'make' process complains about "ar" and "strip" missing, so I created a symbolic link from "/usr/local/bin" to "/usr/ccs/bin/ar" and "/usr/ccs/bin/strip" Also, as a side-note... I'm using Solaris on Intel for 'home use' in order to keep up my Sun skills... Since version 7, the 'software' difference between the 2 architectures is hard to see (so it makes a good platform for simulating what the O/S and software is configured like on the large SPARC systems at work, since all of the scripts and config files are the same), and it's a lot cheaper than to go out and buy a decent Sparc setup...