Lyx and RedHat 7.2

[Josko Plazonic]

Hi all,   I just wanted to give you a heads up on possible problems with new RedHat 7.2 (I spent some time debugging it - I am hoping to spare other people from same work).  All of the following applies to 1.1.6fix3.   First of all - available rpm's for redhat will not rebuild properly - i.e. they will build but lyx will not run.  It crashes during startup with a SIGSEGV - apparently problem due to either compiler flag used in rpm building -mcpu=i686 or else (more probably) the missing -fno-exceptions flag.  I say this because if one builds lyx from source manually (i.e. not with rpm's) -mcpu optimization is not there and -fno-exceptions is present and with those settings lyx builds and runs fine - this seems to be the only difference.   The other problem is fonts - on a pretty standard 7.2 install I've had lots of problems with superscripts.  Reason is various additional fonts that may or may not be installed on 7.2 system (probably yes because I did a pretty standard setup) and because of eagerness of 7.2 to add all available fonts to font server.  For example, if package urw-fonts is installed (and if you use ghostscript it will be!) -urw-symbol- is preferred to the more usually used -adobe-system-* but it turns out that urw fonts don't seem to report global ascending/descending attributes properly so going into superscript in math mode can be confusing (superscripts are displayed correctly only for characters that extend down - like q,j and simalar ones; others stay on the baseline level).  Similarly some Type1 japanese fonts can be preferred (because proportional unlike standard X11 adobe fonts) but they also don't display properly but this time lyx thinks fonts are bigger horizontally then they are...  The easiest fix is to just specify better fonts used in preferences - I guess an rpm package for RH 7.2 taking care of first problem could easily make sure this is handled too.   I know none of these problems are lyx's fault but I guess you guys should know to expect them...   Josko   P.S. Needless to say - lyx is great...