.comment: British Beer, American Politics, and glibc-2.2 - page 3

Yes, there is a connection

For some entirely goofy reason unsupported by evidence or logic, I decided that the problem was that the gcc-2.95-2 RPMs I'd gotten had been built for a glibc alpha and now would not work. (Hey, it sort of made sense at the time, I suppose.) So I downloaded the source and set about building gcc-2.95-2.

Let it be noted that building gcc from source is a piece of cake. It really is. Read the docs, of course, and pay attention to them, and do what they say. The part that is unusual is the creation of a build directory, changing to it, then building from within that thus far empty directory. A little outside what we're mostly accustomed to, but it works just fine.

As you have surely guessed, having now built and installed the new compiler, I still got the configure error, which of course had nothing to do with the compiler.

Wild guesses having failed, it was time to indulge in a little thought. The error was killing configure at libXext, part of XFree86. Okay. So the next time-consuming stab in the dark was to recompile XFree86-4.01 against the new glibc.

Though XFree is a really weird thing to compile, it builds pretty easily once you've sorted out its manifold quirks, put there for those who want to run it atop Windows or OS/2 or other platforms for whom XFree86 is not the obvious first choice.

But I felt pretty good now about it. I'd been plagued by a loss of horizontal sync for months. Finally, I used XF86Setup from 3.3.6 to make an /etc/XF86Config that contained modelines, which I copied to /etc/X11/XF86Config. I then hacked the modelines to produce my current rock-solid 1280x1024 at 80Hz. Its kindasuckiness can be defeated. A recompile was easy.

Time for the test. I entered the kdesupport source directory and did:

CXXFLAGS=' -march=k6' ./configure
--prefix=/opt/kde -- disable-debug

And it worked!

It also built, as did all of KDE2 CVS except kdepim, with which lots of people have had problems lately.

Lesson learned: When you upgrade your glibc, you'll need to upgrade your XFree86, too, if you compile X applications.