Upgrade to 2.0 the 'painless' way

[Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com>]

  Hi all,

  Well I finally got my hands on a Slackware 3.1 CD, which made the
upgrade to 2.0 relatively painless (most of the many problems I had
were the result of my own brainless blundering).

  The popclient program in Slackware 3.1 is presumably broken.  It puts
empty phantom messages between all the real ones when getting the mail.
I had to replace it by compiling the old popclient source.

  I had amusing problems with sendmail again (actually not at _all_
amusing at the time).  Some of you will recall that when I upgraded to
an ELF system (Slackware 3.0) earlier this fall, sendmail would complain
that it didn't know who it was.  I finally solved the problem (with 
much help from Steve and Jim) by adding a line to /etc/hosts specifying
'donegal' (my machine name) as an alias for localhost.  Although it
says in the header to /etc/hosts that doing this is dangerous.  Well,
it sure did the trick at the time, but when I upgraded to 3.1 (sendmail
8.8?), this alias broke sendmail in a way that not only made it not
work, but made it hang for 60 seconds during the boot sequence as
sendmail got started  up!  This caused me no end of grief until -
completely by chance - I discovered that it didn't hang forever, but
eventually came back (proof that there is a lot to be said for walking
away and taking a few deep breathes sometimes).  

  The Java Development Kit seems to be more reliable under 2.0 (used to
sometimes hangup while running an applet in the background), but I've 
noticed that Netscape 3.0 has a real problem running java apps on my
machine now.  It was always rock-stable, but now regularly (not always)
goes poof when running a java app.  Is anyone else having this
problem or know why I am?  

  One of my main reasons for doing the upgrade to 2.0 was to be able to
try out Vosaic, the real-time streamed video client from vosaic.com.  It
doesn't work at all, as it turns out, and they have yet to answer my
bug report.  Anyone have better luck?

  For anyone not following the Mule list, I have been shown how to fix
a problem that prevented Big5 hanzi from displaying.  If you're interested
I'll send you the fix.

  Final question: are there any real advantages to grabbing one of the
latest 2.x kernels for those of us who don't care at all whether we are
on the bleeding edge or not?

  Aki no kaze fukaba, fuke...
 
Dennis McMurchy, 
Tojinmachi, Fukuoka



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