Redhat 5.0 (was tlug: various stuff)

[<matt@example.com>]

Craig Oda writes:

 > Should I move to RedHat 5.0?  Many people are using RedHat now
 > and I was thinking that it might be time to give it a try again.

Well. Moving to RedHat 5.0 has just blown away a good deal of my
winter vacation . . . but I upgraded the base system from 4.1, while
trying to keep most of my old apps. I think you might a much easier
time of it if you're starting from scratch. Here are my impressions:

glibc seems to work fine. Could be my imagination, but some of the
heavy command-line tools (gzip & tar, for instance) seem to run faster 
now.

Be prepared for problems with apps compiled against libc.so.5. When
you install RHL 5.0, you get your glibc libraries in /lib, and the old 
libraries in /usr/lib/i486-linux/libc5/lib. Some apps can't find the
libraries (TeX is one, I think. Netscape is another). I have no idea
why, but I can only think that the library paths are hard-coded in the 
programs. Some apps were just plain broken--like Ghostscript (ouch!)
and XEmacs (OUCH!!--although it was about time to upgrade anyway). The 
GIMP was not broken. Neither was Applixware, thank God.

The other problem is bloat. If RedHat keeps going the way they are,
they might as well put everything in one big unbreakable package like
Microsoft. Anyway, there are some pretty absurd dependencies, like:

Perl requires tcsh (which many people might want--but not all of us
are into shells in a big way--personally, I'm fine with just bash)

Printtool (the graphical printer setup thingy) requires
rhs-printfilters, mpage, ghostscript, tkInter (which of course requires
Python & tcl/tk) and control-panel (which requires an up-to-date GTK
and probably some other stuff).

Sigh.

But, now that I've got most of the glitches fixed and the necessary
apps upgraded, everything seems to be working fine.

Well, if you decide to go with it, best of luck to ya!

Regards,
Matt Gushee
Oshamanbe, Hokkaido
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