Installing 6.5.3 on LinuxPPC R5

Hello,
I have installed 6.5.3 on LinuxPPC R5 on a Mac 7600 with 128Mb, and a G3
400 MHz upgrade card.
Here are some notes of the installation process:

1) RPM did not place the package contents in the locations mentioned
stated in the INSTALL document. They ended up in /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

2) The documentation talks about the possible need for flex. I needed
it, and having meddled with Unix 15 years ago, it took a while for me to
realise it is a version of lex. Also required are yacc (byacc) and
kernel_headers. I had neither of these, and I am not sure what sort of
other tasks might require the existence of kernel_headers. I have
already installed jdk1.1.8 and netbeans and some other stuff. So,
perhaps a mention that this package is required would help others. Maybe
it's only necessary on Linux?

3) I had to make one source change after all that. In
src/backend/optimizer/path/costsize.c, the compiler warned that MAXINT
was undefined in a couple of functions. I tried to track it down and
found it in limits.h and various other places. However, I have little
experience with compiling big C projects, did not know how to see what
was happening in the #ifdef etc at the top of costsize.c so added
#define MAXINT INT_MAX before the #include "optimizer/cost.h" line, and
then everything compiled almost without warning. I do not recall seeing
any warnings.

4) When running the regression tests, geometry failed (I think for
rounding issues), random did not fail (?) and plpgsql bombed badly. The
error with this one is a syntax error on 'select * from PField_v1...'. I
tried this in psql as well and got the same error. This does not worry
me too much as I will not be using this extension to SQL.

5) I created my own database and added a 2-column table. I had trouble
initially since I was trying 'insert into acc_balance values ("123",
23.0);' which failed. I finally worked out that it does not like ". I
have used ' and " interchangeably for 10 years on Tandem NonStop SQL but
am not sure of the correct standard.

6) I tried to add a column to the table. \d acc_balance shows the
column, but select * shows no values and I cannot insert any values into
the column. The system says the table does not have such a column. If I
try 'insert into acc_balanace values ('456', 12.33, 'now');' it says I
have supplied too many values. (the last column is a timestamp, so my
syntax may be incorrect).

This is as far as I have got. The reason for installing is to have a
database I can access through JDBC and then use a client to use RMI to
the JDBC 'server'.

Hope this is interesting.

Regards
Godfrey Raftesath
godfrey(dot)raftesath(at)compaq(dot)com