by Hi,
I was wondering if somebody could do me a big favour and e-mail me or
let me know where I can get a binary of the latest texinfo for an i586
Linux machine running RedHat 5.2 with kernel 2.2.10.
Here's my tale of woe to explain it all... (of course, if you know of a
better way of proceding PLEASE let me know!)
I'm currently away from home in a villa in Spain for the month, but I
have brought my laptop with me because I thought I would have a go at
learning Linux (I'm a Linux newbie but have lots of experience with
other operating systems like OS/2). The machine in question is a Sony
Vaio 505TS but without a CD drive, so I installed RedHat 5.2 from a
parallel port CD before I left (I don't have the drive with me). I do,
though, have another laptop running Win98 with a built-in CD and a
network, so I can copy over things from the CD and I suppose I could
try a network re-install if I really had to, but I don't want to
because I've already had lots of fun installed KDE, new Netscape etc.
while getting to know my way around the OS.
I'm interested in developing and running Java servlets under Linux;
however, RH5.2 comes with an old version of Kaffe which does not seem
to work entirely properly with some things and is slow. The problems
are that I can NEVER connected to my mSQL server using the JDBC driver
(always an SQLException) and that compiling JServ fails miserably,
telling me it can't find all sorts of classes which are obviously
there. Also, I noticed some irregularities when I was writing my own
code: for some reason, it seemed to think that if, in a method that was
supposed to return a java.lang.String, I said 'return buf.toString();'
where buf is a StringBuffer I was returning an invalid type: I had to
say 'String s = buf.toString(); return s'. Weird. I don't know how
many of these problems are Kaffe's fault but I decided I would move to
IBM's alpha 1.1.6 anyway (I've had good experience with IBM JDKs) and
then see how many went away. (Again, if you know what these problems
are caused by, please tell me!)
That's where the trouble started - it wanted a 2.2.* kernel and 5.2
only came with 2.0.35, so, I went and downloaded the source and
compiled myself a nice new kernel, 2.2.10. Everything seemed to work -
except my PCMCIA D-Link 650 Ethernet card, which didn't work at all. I
tracked this down to not having an up-to-date enough version of pcmcia-
cs, so, I went and downloaded and installed the latest release, and
that worked fine. The card still didn't work, though: at startup it
said something like:
cardmgr: cannot locate module net-pf4
cardmgr: cannot locate module net-pf5
cardmgr: cannot locate module net-pf4
cardmgr: cannot locate module net-pf5
cardmgr: cannot locate module net-pf4
and pings etc. didn't work but, if I just start linuxconf and quit, it
all seems to be OK. I haven't got around to finding out why - does
anyone know, btw?
Anyway, so, the next thing this JDK wanted was glibc 2.1 so off I went
to the ftp server and got it and tried to install it. However, the
configure program stopped and said I only had gcc 2.75.3 or something
and that I needed a newer C compiler, so I went to a GNU ftp mirror and
got gcc 2.95 and tried to install that. It seemed to be OK, so I tried
glibc again. It still said I had gcc 2.75.3! I realised this was
because I had the old one installed in /bin and the new one
in /usr/bin, and /bin was first in the path. I copied the new one on
top of the old and tried again. No joy, it now said that I had gcc
2.95 and that was no good, despite the INSTALL saying it was fine. I
delved into the configure script and found the reason - it said it was
only OK if gcc version was 2.9[1-9].* Changing this to 2.9[1-9]* fixed
the problem - is this a bug? My version would work if you had 2.95.x
too, but their one doesn't work unless you have two decimal places...
Can someone explain this?
After fiddling with this, I finally managed to do a configure and a
make. When I tried a make install, however, it died on me again,
trying to install the manuals. 'Unnecessary arguments', Error 1, Error
2 etc. I checked the INSTALL again (the m*of this story is, RTFM,
but I didn't know what versions of things I had...) and it told me I
needed a new version of texinfo. It turns out I don't seem to have it
installed at all, despite telling the RedHat setup program to install
everything. So, off I went to my local GNU ftp mirror and I downloaded
the texinfo source. I ran the configure and... it broke. Error: your
C compiler cannot compile executables.
So now I'm stumped. I suspect this is because I've got halfway through
the installation of new C libraries, which might have messed up what
was already there. I can't go on without getting texinfo installed,
and I can't compile that from source. (I suppose it might be possible
to hack the glibc install scripts to just skip all the documentation
stuff - I don't need it - but I don't know how: if someone could point
me in the right direction that would be great). I searched on
Freshmeat etc. for a binary distribution of texinfo but I could only
find it as part of tetex which is at least a 15MB download. The lines
here in Spain are slow and expensive, so I'd like to avoid that if I
can. So, my plea: could somebody please send me a binary texinfo for
linux-i586 or advise me of a another, better way to proceed?
Thanks VERY much,
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