after having used ghc on linux and win32 for quite a while now I am stuck with installing the binary distribution on Solaris.

The Solaris machine does not have a gcc installed. This is correctly detected by ./configure.

You really need gcc, sorry. I don't know what might have caused the link errors you saw, but it may be an artifact of doing linking through Solaris's cc rather gcc (actually I'm surprised it got that far). Cheers, Simon