by Well I fixed on my own, no sooner had that been done no less than 6
replies came in suggesting pretty well what I had done. Thanks all
for taking the time out to help. Only difference was that I couldn't
mount my filesystem on /mnt of the root floppy, kept getting device
busy (something else already mounted there? But cd'ing to it showed
nothing) anyhow, the workaround was to create /mnt2 on the floppy and
then mounted /dev/hdb1 there, from there the rest was easy.
and /usr/sbin would have worked as they are statically linked binaries
and do not use the shared libraries.
Thanks again everyone (replies from places as far-flung as Denmark, Switzerland,
and the U.S. I'm in Toronto myself...)
For the benefit of anyone reading this due to a similar problem on their own
system, here's the gist of it:
(fortunately my windows set-up was working fine thru all this...)
1) Boot from a floppy with a kernel image. If you don't have one head over to your
favorite Linux ftp site and get one (i.e. sunsite, in /pub/Linux/kernels or something
like that) I used either zImage or bare.b ;while your there grab an installation
root filesystem, in my case from /pub/Linux/distributions/slackware/, i used tty144.
2) when prompted insert the root filesys, do not choose option option to install from
scratch, select option to [a]dd software
3) after logged in as root, mount your root filesystem. For examples on how to do this,
run pkgtool with no args and it will supply some. If unsure of your filesystem type,
you can discern this by booting from the HD (maybe you should do this first), the
filesystem type (i.e. ext2) is one of the last messages you'll get before the
"Can't find libc.so.4" msg hangs the whole system.
4) My linux is on a secondary HD and for some reason I couldn't mount to /mnt on
the floppy, so I created /mnt2 and mounted there:
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt2 -t ext2
5) at this point you can cd to /mnt2/lib and then I simply mv'd the old lib file
back to where it was in the first place (left the new libs alone for the moment)
6) reboot, everything's cool (whew!!)
7) the m*of the story and what I SHOULD HAVE DONE in the first place:
run "ldconfig" (no args), the libc.so.4 and libm.so.4 files are now linked
to the new libraries, perl now works. I can breathe again.
Thanks again to evryone who responded, I sent a batch email to all, thanks in
advance to any more forthcoming responses. (I'm sure a few will trickle in).
The m*of the story... USE ldconfig!!!!!!
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Mark Jeftovic http://www.veryComputer.com/~markjr