Why SuSE 9.0 vs. 9.1?

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>With neither thought nor caution, Bill Campbell blurted:
>> On Fri, Jul 30, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>> >Simon--er, no...it was Bill Campbell--said:
>> >> 
>> >> One problem I've had with the fully updated SuSE 9.1 Professional
>> >> desktop system here is that perl::Tk X-clients on other systems
>> >> fail to display on the SuSE 9.1 X server, failing with:
>> >
>> >Ouch!  Oh, that's nasty.  If I thought it was actually pTk's fault, I might
>> >post it to the pTk group but it sounds like a specific X11 bug.
>> 
>> The same perl::Tk scripts work OK running on the 9.1 system, and have been
>> running for years on other systems here including a variety of Linux
>> distributions, FreeBSD, and SCO OpenServer.
>
>Did you mean 9.0 there?  I assume so, but you know what they say...

No, the perl::Tk scripts work on the SuSE 9.1 system when run from an xterm
under kde.

>Yeah, sounds like an internal X11 glitch.  Just "one of those things" that
>makes one wait half a year for a dist to get the kinks out.
>
>Yet another reason I have to laugh at the folly of someone running Fedora
>Core 2 in a production environment.  I mean, it was finalised 5/18/04,
>according to their own site.  That's what, a whole 2.5 months old?  Anyone
>doing that deserves whatever happens.

I have never done Red Hat beyond installing many of their distributions in
a test environment.  I've read too many horror stories of library
incompatibilities, not to mention looking at the internals of many RPM
.spec files from RH.

>> Given that somebody else mentioned downgrading XFree86 on their system, I
>> would suspect that it is an X11 problem.  It's also possible that it's
>> related to the nVidea drivers as there have been known problems where
>> people have attempted to run nVidea's own drivers on the SuSE 9.1 with the
>> 2.6 kernels.  I'm running the vanilla SuSE drivers on this box, not the
>> ones downloaded from nVidea.
>
>If you're running stock SVGA XFree86, with no nVidia, would it be due to a
>-lack- of drivers for it?  You're saying pTk programs fail on your system,
>but you're not using the custom drivers.  Are they that non-standard?  :)
>Actually, is that how it works?  Not having an nVidia anything, I'm just
>hazarding a guess that it's similar to XFree86-s3 and the like, where they
>have a separate core for the chipset.  Or is it implemented differently?
>
>Hmmmm.  I wonder if it's -just- pTk or if it's Tk as well that's affected.
>They're separate creatures, despite the intermingled lineage.  I thought
>there was a Tk test program but it's been five years or more since I tried
>it, so I can't remember what it's called. 

I know that the perl::Tk module from CPAN has some extensive testing when
one does a ``make test'', but it's been years since I built that manually.
I'm using the OpenPKG perl packages which are very good about maintaining
consistency between their perl package and the installed modules.

FWIW, I was running SuSE 8.2 Professional on this same HP hardware before
installing the SuSE 9.1 Professional, and have run quite a few different
distros on this box including Caldera eDesktop 2.4, OpenLinux 3.1.1, SCO
Linux (UnitedLinux), Dead Rat 7.2, and at least one version of Mandrake.

Bill
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