Upgrade to 1.2, Netscape Java solution, etc.

[siemers@bms.com (Nathan O. Siemers)]

Hello:
	Before I talk about problems, let me say that the 1.2 release
that the people here have produced is very impressive and fairly
solid.  Nice work! I've got an AST Ascentia laptop running with full
X, mouse, sound, ethernet, ppp, and power management. All with just a
few days of tweaking by someone who only marginally knows what he is
doing. 

Now:

Netscape 3.01 does not perform nearly as well with the new release as
it did with deb 1.1. I have basically had to turn Java off in order to
keep it from crashing every five minutes. It seems there are problems
with the later linux c libraries that break netscape (reveal a
bug?). I saw a workaround by looking through dejanews (setting library
load paths to point to old libraries before netscape is run), but the
author specifically said this was not a fix for the (a) java
problem. What's the best way to workaround this? (I've got
jdk, but would like netscape java too).

Some small notes:

I recompiled the kernel for sound, which works fine, except that the
module does not get automatically loaded when something like bplay
tries to use /dev/dsp. Isn't kerneld or a similar daemon supposed to
deal with this?

Killing the gpm process hangs my system (I was not on a network so I
don't know if I could telnet in or not, the keyboard was frozen). Does
this happen on other boxes? I got an undescriptive error when dselect
tried to remove the package from my system, I had to take it away by
hand. Ick.

Finally: My XF86Config took some tweaking to get the 800x600 screen to
function without weird effects. With the precompiled kernel, I got it
almost perfect, except that the screen was shifted about 50 pixels to
the right of center. Funny thing is, when I cooked up my own kernel,
the problem went away. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but
*why* would that happen?

Take care (and thanks),

	nathan



-- 
Nathan Siemers - Department of Bioinformatics
Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceutical Research Institute
K14-06, P.O. Box 4000, Princeton, NJ 08543-4000; (609) 252-6568