Dep and another colleague had suggested I take a look at my glibc version before installing XF86 4.0 or KDE2, and they recommended 2.1.3. I was at 2.1.1, so the first thing I did was to upgrade. Given how central glibc is to the entire system, I was expecting this to be a nightmare. It actually turned out to be the easiest part of the whole process. I just grabbed the source tarball for glibc 2.1.3 itself, plus the appropriate versions of glibc crypt and linuxthreads. Crypt and linuxthreads get unpacked inside the source directory. Then I ran:

./configure --enable-add-ons=crypt,linuxthreads
make
make install

from that same directory. Everything worked fine. (Note that if your previous version of glibc came from an RPM, your RPM database is now out of sync. I made a conscious choice on my machine that I didn't care, but you may want to take a more deliberate installation path and use the rpm command to uninstall the old version after making a careful backup.) You may not even need to do this step; I upgraded because I trusted the people who recommended it, not for a specific technical reason.

Next: Step 2: Installing XFree86 4.0 »