Installation On Solaris

If using a Solaris system, mod_wsgi can be compiled from source code by following standard installation instructions.

For descriptions of problems that may be encountered during installation on Solaris, see the general documentation on "Installation Issues".

The following Solaris specific issues can also arise.

Missing Shared Libraries

By default, compilers on the Solaris platform will not build a dynamically loadable object where libraries required are only available as a static library. This can particularly be a problem if the version of Python being used was not configured and installed so as to produce a shared library.

The error output from the compiler when such a problem arises will be:

/home/shauer/sys/apache-2.2.6/build/libtool --silent --mode=link gcc -o \
 mod_wsgi.la  -rpath /home/shauer/sys/apache-2.2.6/modules -module \
 -avoid-version    mod_wsgi.lo -L/usr/local/lib/python2.5/config \
 -lpython2.5 -lresolv -lsocket -lnsl -lrt -ldl
Text relocation remains                         referenced
   against symbol                  offset      in file
<unknown>                           0x1030      /usr/local/lib/python2.5/config/libpython2.5.a(floatobject.o)
<unknown>                           0x1034      /usr/local/lib/python2.5/config/libpython2.5.a(floatobject.o)
<unknown>                           0x1038      /usr/local/lib/python2.5/config/libpython2.5.a(floatobject.o)
<unknown>                           0x103c      /usr/local/lib/python2.5/config/libpython2.5.a(floatobject.o)
<unknown>                           0x1040      /usr/local/lib/python2.5/config/libpython2.5.a(floatobject.o)
<unknown>                           0x1044      /usr/local/lib/python2.5/config/libpython2.5.a(floatobject.o)

As explained in section 'Lack Of Python Shared Library' of Installation Issues, the prefered remedy is to recompile and reinstall Python so that it provides a shared library. If for some reason this is not possible, then the 'Makefile' for mod_wsgi should be modified after having run 'configure', with the 'LDFLAGS' variables being ammended to pass the '-mimpure-text' option through to the linker in addition to other options also being used.

LDFLAGS = -mimpure-text ....

Do note that although this will work, it is not at all recommended. This is because compilers on Solaris seem to generate much much larger object files than other platforms. This means that the static Python library can be 7MB or more in size. If this has to be linked statically into the mod_wsgi, when loaded into memory it can result very large memory usage by the Apache child processes even before any WSGI application is loaded. In other words, rebuild your Python installation and use a shared library instead.

Precompiled Binaries

Precompiled binary packages are in the process of being made available from:

http://www.opencsw.org/

If not yet in the main package area, see the latest packages uploaded for testing.

http://mirror.opencsw.org/testing.html