Description:
On a dual Xeon system running SuSE 9.0, the binary release of 4.1.3 via icc crashes on start (mysql-standard-4.1.3-beta-pc-linux-i686-icc). I added a "strace" to see where it was crashing, and was led to /etc/nsswitch.conf. A little experimentation showed that the entries "passwd: compat" and "group: compat" needed to be changed, to something like "passwd: files".
This seems like some weird behavior, but there it is. I didn't test with other Linux flavors, but found that the gcc version would run fine (mysql-max-4.0.20-pc-linux-i686).
It's hard to tell whether this is some sort of bug in this particular SuSE release, or something with glibc, or with the Intel compilers. But I hope this behavior finds its way into the release notes, to save other folks from needing to do all the research to track this problem down. This is on a glibc 2.3 system (libc.so.6).
How to repeat:
Download the binary versions mentioned below; run the icc version and presumably replicate the crash. Then, edit /etc/nsswitch.conf as shown, and see things succeed.
Suggested fix:
This might just need some sort of message in the installation notes. It doesn't appear to be a problem with MySQL, though it might have to do with the intersection of mysql and the libraries used by icc.