[CentOS] Fedora Legacy shutting down

Wed Jan 10 00:16:16 UTC 2007
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On Sunday 07 January 2007 11:19, chrism at imntv.com wrote:
> Just curious about why you'd choose to do that rather than upgrade to
> the latest 3.x or 4.x release.  Do you have some canned binaries that
> won't run on a more recent vintage system even with the compatibility libs?

FWIW, I have a few canned binaries in use at one site that require two really 
archaic libs.  One is (wait for it) libc5-based.  Yes, libc-5.3.12, last 
libc5 on RH.  Latest libc5 compat was distributed with RHL6.2.  The other is 
linked against glibc 2.0; it is multithreaded and does not work with glibc 
2.2 (we have tried; it doesn't work) but it will work with glibc 2.1. 

The first app was originally released for Red Hat Linux 4.x (not RHEL4; we 
have come full circle on versions, no?), and the second was released for RHL 
5.  The CentOS 2.1 VM (VMware server is great for running legacy stuff on 
modern hardware that isn't supportable by the old OS) replaces the really old 
RHL 4.2 PentiumPro 200 server and the old but not quite so old Mandrake 5.3 
K6-2 500 server (back when Mandrake was RHL+KDE in effect).

It is a case of 'the app works and we ain't paying for an upgrade we don't 
need when the app cost x thousand dollars!'  Can't blame them at all; the app 
does work and works well, both pieces.  Has for nearly ten years now, with 
very little downtime.  Serves the need (it's a fairly specialized broadcast 
radio application written on AOLserver 2.x and tied to some odd backend 
stuff).

But have you tried installing RHL 4.2 lately on anything more modern than a 
Pentium II?  Or RHL 5.2 (Mandrake 5.3) on anything more modern than a P3?  
VMware server solves the problem very nicely.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu