Solar powered Rakudo
Lately I have been thinking more and more that Ubuntu is not the operating system for me. Don’t get me wrong, it is fantastic and I would easily recommend it to anyone wanting to try Linux but in the interest of expanding my horizons I decided to try something different. My first thought was another Linux distribution, Gentoo being one I have meant to try for a long time now but instead I took the plunge into something completely different and installed OpenSolaris, an open source Unix-like OS based on Sun’s Solaris.
My first impression was how nice the UI looked (funny how we tend to notice the unimportant things first 
) , my second impression was that it seemed rather familiar coming from Ubuntu.
To put my adventuring to good use I wanted to test Rakudo on it.
To install Rakudo in OSOL you need GCC, GNU Make, Subversion and Git. Perl is already installed.
To install these I did:
carlin@aethon:~$ pkg install SUNWgcc
carlin@aethon:~$ pkg install SUNWgmake
carlin@aethon:~$ pkg install SUNWgit
carlin@aethon:~$ pkg install SUNWsubversion
Then checked out Rakudo:
carlin@aethon:~$ git clone git://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git
carlin@aethon:~$ cd rakudo
Configured Rakudo and generated Parrot:
carlin@aethon:~/rakudo$ perl Configure.pl --gen-parrot
And then ran make:
carlin@aethon:~/rakudo$ gmake install
You have to type gmake to use GNU Make. The default make command runs Sun’s make utility and I wasn’t able to get it to work.
Everything seemed to go as expected and at the end I had a working Rakudo:
carlin@aethon:~/rakudo$ ./perl6
> say 'OH HAI';
OH HAI
The spectest didn’t turn up platform-specific usualness, except that Solaris wasn’t a known OS to rakudo; which was easily fixed.
