Making some progress.

Starting with a fresh merovingian process,

I did an "strace -fe file,process -p PID] on it.

"monetdb create test" did nothing, but

"start test" shows it opens the dbfarm directory,

and mal_init.mal, but then fails to find any of the MonetDB5 .sos [excriciating scroll included below]

because only the .a and .la files got installed there. The build tree is also stripped of .sos.

[root@mork MonetDBFast]# ls lib/MonetDB5/lib
lib_aggr.a lib_batifthen.la lib_clients.a lib_inet.la lib_mal_scheduler.a lib_pqueue.la lib_streams.la
lib_aggr.la lib_batmath.a lib_clients.la lib_inspect.a lib_mal_scheduler.la lib_profiler.a lib_str.la
[...]

and then gets this for a segfault:

[pid 9810] rename("bat/BBP.dir", "bat/BACKUP/BBP.dir") = 0
[pid 9810] open("/usr/local/MonetDBFast/lib/MonetDB5/mal_init.mal", O_RDONLY) = 15
[pid 9810] open("/usr/local/MonetDBFast/lib/MonetDB5/mal_init.mal", O_RDONLY) = 15
[pid 9810] open("/usr/local

[...]

[pid 9810] open("/usr/local/MonetDBFast/lib/MonetDB5/bin/lib_blob.so", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
[pid 9810] open("/usr/local/MonetDBFast/lib/MonetDB5/blob.mal", O_RDONLY) = 16
[pid 9810] open("/usr/local/MonetDBFast/lib/MonetDB5/blob.mal", O_RDONLY) = 16
[pid 9810] --- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) @ 0 (0) ---
Process 9810 detached
[pid 9811] +++ killed by SIGSEGV +++
[pid 9800] --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
[pid 9800] wait4(-1, Process 9800 suspended