Sections:
Main page
Linux in the news
Security
Kernel
Distributions
Ports
Development
Commerce
Announcements
Back page
All in one big page

Ports

Sparc

Sparc users continue to grumble about Red Hat 5.2, which has install problems on certain machines. Here is one report posted by a user who had some difficulties. There are also complaints about the Sun4c architecture not working well. Out of all this came one useful hint for those upgrading from a previous Red Hat Sparc release: remove the directory:

/usr/lib/kbd/keytables

before doing the upgrade. Evidently this directory turns into a file in the new RPM, and RPM doesn't handle that well.

Alpha

Alpha users, too, have run into some difficulties with Red Hat 5.2. The most commonly reported problem is that the installation dies with a segmentation fault just prior to the "select packages" step. There is a workaround: don't tell the install that you want to customize the package list. Take what it gives you, then you can adjust the packages on your system later with rpm.

On the Debian alpha side, Miquel van Smoorenburg has uploadeda new version of sysvinit, version 2.76-2. This fixes the infamous "init u" bug which caused actual corruption of the file system during some installations. Miquel stated that the package should now compile, install and run cleanly on the Alpha system, "as would be expected."

In addition, after a lot of hard work, Christopher Chimel reported that he finally had a working Jade package for the alpha. Be sure and check his message if you want to install it, since special efforts to remove some old packages are required to get it working.

Nikita Schmidt reported that there seems to be a bug in kernel 2.1.127 which caused a kernel panic on his machine when the kernel ran init. His post includes a patch that worked for him to resolve the problem.

The Java JDK version 1.1.7 has been released for the Alpha. Uncle George, the person who did the work, says he thinks it's ready for prime time. See his announcement for information on how to get this package.

M68k

The latest Linux/m68k registration stats have been posted, have a look at them here. The bulk of m68k users have Amigas (71%), while very few have Apollos (0.14%) or Sun 3's (1%).

PowerPC

The LinuxPPC project has announced a new "lite" distribution for the PowerPC. The entire distribution fits within 75MB, but comes with BootX and still boots into KDE. See their press release for more.

November 12, 1998

Next: Development