Hi. I'm seeking a way out of RPM hell, and it looks like it involves some
rather nasty installs from source. I'll try to describe the problem
concisely, but it's a fairly big problem.
I have a Red Hat 6.1 box, on which I've been attempting to install an 80 GB
IDE drive. As mentioned in the Large-Disk HOWTO, at
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html#biosupgrades:
The problem is that with the default 16 heads and 63 sectors/
track this corresponds to a number of cylinders of more than
65535, which does not fit into a short. Most BIOSes in existence
today can't handle such disks. (See, e.g., Asus upgrades for new
flash images that work.) Linux kernels older than 2.2.14 /
2.3.21 need a patch. See IDE problems with 34+ GB disks below.
(The text "IDE problems with 34+ GB disks" is a hyperlink to more useful
information.)
When I first got this disk, the machine in question was running 2.2.12-20
(which came with the RH6.1 distro). I've since upgraded it to 2.4.1, with
the kernel patches to handle large disks.
In addition, I've tried to upgrade various other modules and packages, in
accordance with the kernel documentation. However, a couple of them have
proved a bit intractable: util-linux and modutils. This is where the RPM
hell comes in.
I'm running rpm 3.0.6-6x. To upgrade to util-linux-2.10o or modutils-2.4.0,
I need to have glibc-2.2. My current version is 2.1.2-11. However, I can't
upgrade glibc using rpm, because I need a higher version of rpm.
I tried installing rpm 4.0.2 from source, but it immediately barfed and
told me I needed a higher glibc.
So now I'm wondering just how dangerous it would be to try to install glibc
2.2.3 from source. The GNU glibc Web page does not make it sound at all
easy, and points out that you can do irreparable damage to your system if
you screw up.
FWIW, I do have experience installing from source -- I've done it with
Apache, Perl, Qmail, Samba, BIND, and a few other things. But GNU makes
this one sound like an *extremely* daunting task.
And really, I don't *care* what version of glibc I'm running. All i want is
for my Linux machine to recognize its 80 GB IDE drive.
Is there any other way to do it? Is a source glibc install really as scary
as GNU makes it sound? Is there anything else I should know, or any other
advice anyone has? Thanks in advance for any pointers anyone can give me.
--Kai MacTane
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Playing dead and sweet submission,
Cracks the whip deadpan on cue."
--Siouxsie and the
Banshees,
"Peek-a-boo"
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