Here are several related questions. I'm running a 1.1 system upgraded from 0.93. All base and devel packages are the latest available in the 'unstable' tree; I'm not completely up to date with the 'Incoming' directory. So I have gcc-2.7.2-8 and libc5/libc5-dev 5.2.18-6. I'm using kernel 1.2.13, compiled myself. I wonder if I should move to a 1.3 version, and, of course, if so, which? The (hopeful) proximity of 2.0 official is another factor. I've got a lot to learn here.
Issues: I'm trying to get networking going for the first time (to a dialup ppp account). Some of the docs say ppp-2.2.0 (I have 2.2.0-f) needs a 1.3 kernel to work. I'm not yet at the point of firing up to test it myself. Will a kernel upgrade be necessary? I'd like to go all-ELF, for simplicity, and because I hope it can save memory on my 4M system only having one set of shared libs. I guessed I'd have to have a kernel made with gcc-2.7.x to do this. Again, do I need to upgrade to a 1.3 kernel? I could try to apply patches from the net which claim to make 1.2.13 compilable as ELF by gcc 2.7's. I don't know if this is a good idea, or whether any of these questions will prove to require a 1.3+ kernel anyway. Beside the considering the kernel itself as an a.out binary, and I don't know if that counts; to go along with my 1.2.13 kernel I've had to keep (downgrade to, actually) the 0.93, a.out versions of the syslogd and modules packages. So, to keep using packaged versions rather than making my own (would that better at this point? I haven't figured out yet how desirable it is to have all-debianized software), I'd have to get a 1.3 kernel and the sysklogd, modules, and modconf packages that go with it. I see a 1.3.100 kernel package available but sysklog and modules for 1.3.69. Would those work together acceptably? Plus then, if I go that high, there's the new /proc system, and probably other things, to sort out. I thought I was ready to take on the Debian beta release, not ready to move beyond production kernels; do they really go together? Maybe I should have waited; excuse me if I'm just too far behind here. On the other hand, maybe I've just been warned off development kernels too hard. Also: there are a couple of orphaned a.out binaries on my system: The unstripped perl binary included in the base 0.93 system has not been replaced by an ELF version. I wasn't going to install the full perl package yet, but I know I shouldn't delete perl off the system. Is this a bug? I never installed a samba package, but something that I can't figure out, using dpkg -S or looking at the 0.93 and 1.1 Contents files, has put/left an smbclient binary on my system (I'm sorry, it's not in front of me to check where, it's probably in /usr/bin.) Are either of these last two a problem for anyone else? (Related: I see someone's already reported the a.out setterm binary as a bug.) Thanks for any education here, Ed -- Ed Donovan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
