[plug] Just started with linux, need help

[Michael Hunt]

> Michael Hunt wrote:
> >
> > Ah you have refreshed my memory at this early hour John !!!!
> >
> > Glibc 2.1 is in the development series though iirc. Maybe bugs
> are due to
> > this fact rather than coding problems in Netscape.
>
> Ummm... I don't think you do recall correctly - I'm pretty sure that
> glibc 2.1 is considered a "stable" release (ie, doesn't use the same
> versioning system as the kernel).  I've been running glibc 2.1.1 (2.1.2
> is out now) for quite a while without any problems and distributions
> have also been including it in their systems since its release and I
> don't think they would do this if it were the development/unstable
> tree.  If I've got this wrong then someone please correct me.

Well I haven't found anything to confirm or deny this one way or the other
(a quick search of gnu.org and my local doco didn't turn up anything). The
only thing I can remember is reading up about this on LWN sometime back.
IIRC (hey and that's yet to be proved, I do believe I could be wrong) the
article said the 2.1.x version series is a development one just like the
kernel series (odd numbers dev, even stable). the article went on to
describe that RedHat was one of the first distros to include it because of
the feature set and was criticized for it, but before long all the distros
were using it because of its stability. But I am not a coder only a humble
tech who tweaks config files and writes scripts to get the best performance
out of his machine.

> My experience with Netscape has been that the libc5-linked versions are
> much more stable than the libc6 ones (although I've heard people report
> the opposite so YMMV) so I use these - I don't blame this in any way on
> libc6 since Netscape appears to be the only thing which has trouble with
> it, and Netscape doesn't exactly have a reputation for being
> rock-solid...

I'd say you are probably right in this regards as the libraries are
important to so many apps other than Netscape, that if there where bugs in
it, they would have to clearly been fixed. I've only used the default
Netscape installed with my distro (RedHat 6.0) and on occasions it performs
like a dog chewing up resources like there is no tomorrow. Then it locks up
my system or core dumps, or I have to kill it off to get any work done. I
don't have any other apps that do this (even ones that would be definitely
classed as unstable/alpha).

Mozilla will hopefully be the better browser due to its open nature (hence
the finger pointing scenario can hopefully be avoided). But time will only
tell.