embarrassing question

[Joshua S. Freeman]

On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 bscott at ntisys.com wrote:

> On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, at 8:37pm, jfreeman at threeofus.com wrote:
> > believe it or not, my friend Dick Morrell of Smoothwall fame pointed me to 
> > this fantastic site that maintains rpms for end-of-lifed RH distros (like 
> > 6.2) so I've upgraded most of my apps... 
> 
>   Could you provide the name and address of the site?  :)

Here it is... 

http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/

> 
> > so.. the question now... will a break everything if I now try to run all 
> > those apps on the new 2.6 kernel?
> 
>   The answer is, as usual, more complex then "yes" or "no".

figured as much

> 
>   First of all, some apps are more independent of the host platform then
> others.  For example, any user application that makes use of an interpreter
> (Perl, Python, Java, etc.) is likely not going to care what operating
> system, let alone what kernel revision, you are running.

ok


>   Anything designed to talk directly to the kernel is likely going to need
> to be upgraded -- but you could prolly guess that yourself.  For example,
> the "modutils" and "util-linux" packages are highly kernel-specific.  
> Things like XFree, which do a lot of low-level hardware communications, also
> tend to be effected by kernel changes.


makes sense... i only communicate with this box via ssh... i don't have 
any graphic interface stuff installed on it.. does that make a difference?

>   When it comes to application software like, say, AbiWord or Gnumeric,
> things get a bit more vague.  They likely don't care what release of the
> kernel you are running.  However, they were also likely compiled to use
> shared libraries.  That includes the main system libraries, somewhat
> misleadingly called the "GNU C library", or "glibc" [1].  Binary
> compatibility being what it is [2], you typically need to recompile your
> applications if you change the C library.  And you will find you frequently
> need to upgrade -- or at the very least recompile -- the C library for a 
> major kernel revision.

mm hmm


>   The documentation provided with the 2.6 kernel should give you some idea
> of what minimum software revisions are needed.

gotcha... 

maybe i should just start by upgrading to 2.2.25?

J.


> Footnotes
> ---------
> 
> [1] I say "misleadingly" because they contain a great deal more then just
>     the ANSI C standard library, and because they are important to programs
>     written in just about any language, not just C.
> 
> [2] Binary compatibility is difficult at best, and often impossible in
>     the real world.
> 
> 

-- 
------
Joshua S. Freeman
jfreeman at 4ofus.net