Re: Glibc2.1 and Netscape

[Derek Lichter <ddl@netris.org>]

On Wed, May 26, 1999 at 07:59:16PM -0400, Deirdre Saoirse wrote:
> Paul Mackerras pointed out to me yesterday why my netscape wasn't working:
> Glibc2.1, which is incompatible with the version used to compile Netscape.
> 
> Two points:
> 
> a) does anyone know if and/or when a newer version of Netscape will be out
> that we CAN run?
> 
> b) a workaround occurred to me later: good old ssh and X. I now ssh into a
> coworker's box (x86 linux in this case) and run Netscape there. The
> display is automagically forwarded (encrypted) to my machine. :)

With a ton of help from my housemate Mark (mhw@netris.org), I worked around
this problem by pointing netscape to use old libraries at runtime.  Here're
the basic steps we took:

- pulled old shared libraries from the following redhat rpms in
  ftp://ftp.linuxppc.org/linuxppc-R4/RedHat/RPMS:
     X11R6.3-libs-01-1r.ppc.rpm
     glibc-0.961212-1h.ppc.rpm
     xpm-3.4j-1b.ppc.rpm
     libg++-2.8.1.980306-1c.ppc.rpm

- dumped them into a newly-created directory, /usr/lib/netscape/base-4/old

- in this directory, edited ld.so.1 to change the library path string:

  % perl -pe 's/LD_LIBRARY_PATH/LD_LIBRARY_PAT1/' ld.so.1 > ld.so.1.new
  % mv ld.so.1 ld.so.1.OLD
  % mv ld.so.1.new ld.so.1

- moved the netscape 4.08 binary (which i have installed in
  /usr/local/bin) to netscape-exec

- created a wrapper script as /usr/local/bin/netscape; its contents:

  #!/bin/sh

  LIBDIR=/usr/lib/netscape/base-4/old

  LD_LIBRARY_PAT1=${LIBDIR} exec ${LIBDIR}/ld.so.1 \
  /usr/local/bin/netscape-exec "$@"

This works well enough (until I can get mozilla built, i guess)... hopefully
I haven't left any steps out.  (I should also note that I'm running debian,
not redhat; I've crossposted to the debian-powerpc list in case it's useful
there, too.)

-d.d-