Re: first impressions of Red Hat 6.0

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@luci.org>]

On  2 May, Steven Pritchard wrote:
> 
> I managed to burn a CD of Red Hat 6.0 at work on Friday.  Friday night
> I started to install packages from it, and I managed to render my
> system completely unusable.  I continued (thank heavens for sash and
> statically linked rpm), and figured out that installing the
> compat-glibc (and probably the compat-libs) rpm is a Bad Thing, at
> least on my system.  YMMV.  Oddly enough, it looks like all my stuff
> that is linked against glibc 2.0 works just fine with only glibc 2.1
> installed.  (I would imagine that doing a proper upgrade would
> eliminate all these headaches, but I appear to enjoy doing things the
> hard way.)

Debian is in the midst of this flame war as we speak.  The upshot is
that most things work; the only things that don't are things that use
undocumented/internal glibc magic.  Since the glibc team has been
warning everyone against using internal functions for some time now,
IMHO there's nothing wrong with breaking all that stuff and saying "I
told you so".  The few exceptions to that rule (low-level system
routines and such) have mostly been coordinating with the glibc crowd,
and work OK (although they usually have to be rebuilt).

Some big things that are reported to break with glibc 2.1:

 - Netscape, if you use the unsupported one that's glibc-linked.  (No
 idea what state RH's Netscape packages are in.)

 - Java.  If your JDK is linked against glibc, it won't work.  This is
 (reportedly) intentional, as Java has to do enough weird stuff that
 the Java team decided to hook into libc internals.  No idea on the
 progress of the glibc 2.1 hacks.

> After installing all of the GNOME stuff, plus all of the other rpms
> that I'd missed, I decided to start playing with my desktop.  I'm now
> running a rather frightening setup, all with the stuff that comes with
> RH6.  I'm using WindowMaker as my window manager, but I'm running the
> KDE panel (on autohide along the bottom), *and* the GNOME panel (on
> autohide, set to a corner panel along the right).  It's crazy, but I
> think I like this setup.  :-)  (I'd be afraid to see how much memory
> I'm chewing up with all of this...  :)

Whoa.  You're a sick man.  Get help before it's too late. :-)



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