[155] in SIPB_Linux_Development
Linux releases
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Haynes)
Wed Sep 22 19:54:03 1993
From: haynes@cats.ucsc.edu (Jim Haynes)
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 93 16:52:32 -0700
To: linux-dev@mit.edu
I too am interested in the TAMU distribution for the reasons you mention;
the sources are supposed to correspond to the binaries (what a concept!).
I do a lot of whining about the difficulty of managing the configuration
in Linux because you never know which sources a given binary was compiled
from.
I started with SLS 1.02, switched to MCC, have not played with SLS 1.03
because there have been so many reported bugs, then fired up TAMU for
the experience. (I haven't done anything serious with any of these
systems, so it's more a process of getting familiar with what's involved
in getting and installing them.
I liked MCC really well, in terms of everything working well together.
The only trouble I had with it in my limited use is that the networking
has some obvious deficiences. If you telnet to a MCC-Linux host and
cat a large file you get several screenfuls and then the transmission
gets jerky and eventually hangs up altogether.
TAMU seems to be free of that network problem. And it's a pretty complete
distribution, whereas with MCC you have to put on X separately. I've only
worked on it for a couple of days, so I don't have much to brag or
gripe about yet. I've got to try a new install on the home machine
tonight; some problems I had there didn't happen on a machine here in
the office.
TAMU uses the SVR4 style of init program, which I'm not sure I'm ready to
face yet; but if you're dealing with Solaris 2 already I guess you might
as well have it on Linux.
TAMU uses password shadowing, which is something of an unnecessary
impediment for Athena use. MCC doesn't. And it doesn't seem to work
completely right; I can't log in from xdm.
TAMU comes with some X icons and file manager; I haven't learned what
they do yet. Never having used a Macintosh I'll probably decide I
would rather type than point and click.
I'm having a problem right now with a non-root user starting X - xterm
can't find its libraries even tho LD_LIBRARY_PATH is apparently set.
Works OK for the super user. On the home machine last night X was
extremely slow starting for the super user; and I found the cause was
that it wasn't finding the libraries. Then I linked them from
/usr/X386/lib to /usr/lib and everything started working. But that
wasn't supposed to be necessary. Maybe I blew away something
accidentally.
The simplified Xconfig process in TAMU: well it worked fairly well on the
machine here in the office, but on the home machine it got things into
such a mess that I had to power cycle the machine. In both cases I wound
up using my previous Xconfig files that were so laboriously developed.
