Several ?'s on 1.1 upg, going all-ELF, kernel versions, orphaned a.out binaries

[Ed Donovan <edonovan@world.std.com>]

Here are several related questions.  I'm running a 1.1 system upgraded
from 0.93.  All base and devel packages are the latest available in the
'unstable' tree; I'm not completely up to date with the 'Incoming'
directory.  So I have gcc-2.7.2-8 and libc5/libc5-dev 5.2.18-6.  I'm
using kernel 1.2.13, compiled myself.  I wonder if I should move to a
1.3 version, and, of course, if so, which? The (hopeful) proximity of
2.0 official is another factor.  I've got a lot to learn here.

Issues:

I'm trying to get networking going for the first time (to a dialup ppp
account).  Some of the docs say ppp-2.2.0 (I have 2.2.0-f) needs a 1.3
kernel to work.  I'm not yet at the point of firing up to test it
myself.  Will a kernel upgrade be necessary?

I'd like to go all-ELF, for simplicity, and because I hope it can save
memory on my 4M system only having one set of shared libs.  I guessed
I'd have to have a kernel made with gcc-2.7.x to do this.  Again, do I
need to upgrade to a 1.3 kernel?  I could try to apply patches from the
net which claim to make 1.2.13 compilable as ELF by gcc 2.7's.  I don't
know if this is a good idea, or whether any of these questions will
prove to require a 1.3+ kernel anyway.

Beside the considering the kernel itself as an a.out binary, and I don't
know if that counts; to go along with my 1.2.13 kernel I've had to keep
(downgrade to, actually) the 0.93, a.out versions of the syslogd and
modules packages.  So, to keep using packaged versions rather than
making my own (would that better at this point?  I haven't figured out
yet how desirable it is to have all-debianized software), I'd have to
get a 1.3 kernel and the sysklogd, modules, and modconf packages that go
with it.  I see a 1.3.100 kernel package available but sysklog and
modules for 1.3.69.  Would those work together acceptably?  Plus then,
if I go that high, there's the new /proc system, and probably other
things, to sort out.

I thought I was ready to take on the Debian beta release, not ready to
move beyond production kernels; do they really go together?  Maybe I
should have waited; excuse me if I'm just too far behind here.  On the
other hand, maybe I've just been warned off development kernels too
hard.  

Also: there are a couple of orphaned a.out binaries on my system:  The
unstripped perl binary included in the base 0.93 system has not been
replaced by an ELF version.  I wasn't going to install the full perl
package yet, but I know I shouldn't delete perl off the system.  Is
this a bug?

I never installed a samba package, but something that I can't figure
out, using dpkg -S or looking at the 0.93 and 1.1 Contents files, has
put/left an smbclient binary on my system (I'm sorry, it's not in front
of me to check where, it's probably in /usr/bin.)

Are either of these last two a problem for anyone else?

(Related: I see someone's already reported the a.out setterm binary as a bug.)

Thanks for any education here,

Ed

-- 

Ed Donovan			edonovan@world.std.com