1) The EMBOSS Makefiles hard-code library paths into the
binaries. To enable multiplatform support for BIRCH, we
have to make a different EMBOSS install directory for each
supported platform. For example, 

./configure --prefix=/home/psgendb/local/pkg/EMBOSS-3.0.0/solaris-amd64
./configure --prefix=/home/psgendb/local/pkg/EMBOSS-3.0.0/solaris-sparc
./configure --prefix=/home/psgendb/local/pkg/EMBOSS-3.0.0/linux-x86_64

Each directory will have bin, lib, share etc. directories.
To eliminate duplication, we can replace the share directories
with symbolic links to 

/home/psgendb/local/pkg/EMBOSS-3.0.0/share