And as long as I'm here ... some general Linux talk

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

I had some problems with a PS file, so I wanted to upgrade Ghostscript 
to make sure it was the file and not my printer or old Ghostscript.
Sure enough, it was the file still---I'm going to have to get the guy
to send another (2MB!) copy....

Anyway, the interesting thing is that I had recently upgraded my
GCC to ELF (I haven't tried the ELF kernel yet).  But I had not fixed
my X libraries.  And, of course, all my X software is still a.out.  So 
I grabbed the Linux Developer's Kit CD#3, stuffed it in the drive, and 
untarred the libraries into a temporary directory.  After adding "-L
/tmp/X11R6-ELF/lib" to the link, the build went fine, but of course gs
couldn't find the shared libs.  So I did

cd /lib; tar cvf old-X-links.tar libX*.so.6; rm libX*.so.6
ln -s /tmp/X11R6-ELF/lib/libX*.so.6 .; ldconfig

and gs went like gangbusters.  Now xmahjongg and xmines wouldn't load, 
so I did

cd /lib; rm libX*.so.6; tar xvf old-X-links.tar libX*.so.6; ldconfig

and everything returned to normal.  Anyway, the HDD didn't croak, the
CPU did not catch on fire, the monitor did not blow up, HTTPd kept on
serving, and in general the system just kept on ticking.  Bikkuri
shita!

BTW, I don't run NCSA HTTPd 1.4, I'm still running 1.3 on the public
Web server.  But in local tests HTTPd 1.5beta7 is a wonderful thing,
and I think I'm going to switch over shortly.  The preforking really
does help a lot for throughput, and there don't seem to be any load
implications (both programs idle, Xman ranks higher in top than HTTPd
1.5 :-); as I understand the theory, getting rid of the forking
overhead should make the load from 1.4 and 1.5 less than 1.3.  I don't 
use any of the advanced server features yet (I'm not multi-homed :-( ).

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Socio-Economic Planning                         Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com