[PlanetCCRMA] New to CCRMA

[Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano]

> speaking about this, I have an old question to ask: what are the fundamental 
> differences between redhat 8.0, 9.0 or fedora?

Never thought about this. Newer versions of most packages (important, as
the linux world moves really fast). Better installer (or worse, I've
seen, for example, my laptop display being recognized automatically by
one and not by a later one). Newer version of the kernel which will run
on newer hardware more efficiently (ie: has support for chipset
optimizations not present in previous kernels). See the release notes of
each release for changes they think are important for end users. 

I'm having more and more (small) problems with newer packages that don't
want to build on older versions (mostly 7.3, sometimes 8.0), or required
tweaking to build. Most of the time it is due to older libraries. In
some simple cases I build a new version of the original RedHat required
library (when it does not trigger an "upgrade storm"). But on some
occassions I just give up, and some small Planet CCRMA islands do not
exist on older versions...

> I have redhat 8.0, running happily. But as you build different packages, obviously
> even an up-to-date redhat 8.0 is different from a 9.0. 

Yes, as I mentioned before that eventually becomes a problem. 

> Obviously, the kernels have
> different names, but they are both based on the same stock kernel. So what are the
> differences?

In the kernels? Nothing. Well, the RedHat 9+ kernels have NPTL support
(Native Posix Threading Library) which is not compiled in for 7.3 and
8.0. Otherwise they are the same. Even more, I used to have only _one_
kernel for all distro versions (optimistically). That breaks when you
try to build additional modules with a compiler that is different than
the one used to build the kernel you are running - that is the curse of
binary only kernel modules (think NVIDIA). So I was forced to do
multiple builds, one for each supported version, using the native
compiler of each distro version (no, that did not make me happy :-)

Question to the list: to mantain my sanity I will have to end support
for 7.3 fairly soon, at least sometime before FC2 comes out (more
concurrent versions do not add to fun in life). Are there many Planet
CCRMA dwellers still using 7.3 out there?

-- Fernando