To install the library and its header files, and the Info files of the
manual, type make install. This will
build things, if necessary, before installing them; however, you should
still compile everything first. If you are installing the GNU C Library as your
primary C library, we recommend that you shut the system down to
single-user mode first, and reboot afterward. This minimizes the risk
of breaking things when the library changes out from underneath.
‘make install’ will do the entire job of upgrading from a previous installation of the GNU C Library version 2.x. There may sometimes be headers left behind from the previous installation, but those are generally harmless. If you want to avoid leaving headers behind you can do things in the following order.
You must first build the library (‘make’), optionally check it (‘make check’), switch the include directories and then install (‘make install’). The steps must be done in this order. Not moving the directory before install will result in an unusable mixture of header files from both libraries, but configuring, building, and checking the library requires the ability to compile and run programs against the old library. The new /usr/include, after switching the include directories and before installing the library should contain the Linux headers, but nothing else. If you do this, you will need to restore any headers from libraries other than the GNU C Library yourself after installing the library.
You can install the GNU C Library somewhere other than where you configured
it to go by setting the DESTDIR GNU standard make variable on
the command line for ‘make install’. The value of this variable
is prepended to all the paths for installation. This is useful when
setting up a chroot environment or preparing a binary distribution.
The directory should be specified with an absolute file name. Installing
with the prefix and exec_prefix GNU standard make variables
set is not supported.
The GNU C Library includes a daemon called nscd, which you
may or may not want to run. nscd caches name service lookups; it
can dramatically improve performance with NIS+, and may help with DNS as
well.
One auxiliary program, /usr/libexec/pt_chown, is installed setuid
root if the ‘--enable-pt_chown’ configuration option is used.
This program is invoked by the grantpt function; it sets the
permissions on a pseudoterminal so it can be used by the calling process.
If you are using a Linux kernel with the devpts filesystem enabled
and mounted at /dev/pts, you don’t need this program.
After installation you should configure the time zone ruleset and install locales for your system. The time zone ruleset ensures that timestamps are processed correctly for your location. The locales ensure that the display of information on your system matches the expectations of your language and geographic region.
The GNU C Library is able to use two kinds of localization information sources, the
first is a locale database named locale-archive which is generally
installed as /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive. The locale archive has the
benefit of taking up less space and being very fast to load, but only if you
plan to install sixty or more locales. If you plan to install one or two
locales you can instead install individual locales into their self-named
directories e.g. /usr/lib/locale/en_US.utf8. For example to install
the German locale using the character set for UTF-8 with name de_DE into
the locale archive issue the command ‘localedef -i de_DE -f UTF-8 de_DE’,
and to install just the one locale issue the command ‘localedef
--no-archive -i de_DE -f UTF-8 de_DE’. To configure all locales that are
supported by the GNU C Library, you can issue from your build directory the command
‘make localedata/install-locales’ to install all locales into the locale
archive or ‘make localedata/install-locale-files’ to install all locales
as files in the default configured locale installation directory (derived from
‘--prefix’ or --localedir). To install into an alternative system
root use ‘DESTDIR’ e.g. ‘make localedata/install-locale-files
DESTDIR=/opt/glibc’, but note that this does not change the configured prefix.
To configure the time zone ruleset, set the TZ environment
variable. The script tzselect helps you to select the right value.
As an example, for Germany, tzselect would tell you to use
‘TZ='Europe/Berlin'’. For a system wide installation (the given
paths are for an installation with ‘--prefix=/usr’), link the
time zone file which is in /usr/share/zoneinfo to the file
/etc/localtime. For Germany, you might execute ‘ln -s
/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Berlin /etc/localtime’.