A whole host of software problems :-)

From: Christopher Tidy (cdt22_at_cantabgold.net)
Date: 11/16/04 

Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 21:35:09 +0000 (UTC)

Hello everyone,

I've had endless software problems with my Ultra 2 system in the past
month or so, and after reinstalling all my software about five times I
can't seem to resolve them. I apologise for the length of this message,
but if anyone has the time to read it and make a few suggestions I'd be
very grateful.

Firstly, I've had some problems with CSW packages since I tried to
upgrade my version of GIMP about a month ago. I decided I didn't like
the new version of GIMP because it seems slow on my system, so I tried
to revert to the old version (GIMP 1.2). I also preferred Mozilla 1.5 to
1.7 because 1.7 gave me problems with red text and strange fonts. So I
first of all cleaned out all of my CSW installations, then installed the
older versions of GIMP and Mozilla from unofficial mirror sites. Then I
installed newer versions of the other packages which I wanted.
Unfortunately, it seems that newer packages need newer dependencies, and
older packages older dependencies. So what I'd like to do is install
Mozilla 1.5, GIMP 1.2 and their dependencies in /opt/cswold (say) and
the rest of my CSW packages in /opt/csw as normal. Is it possible to
change the base directory in which pkg-get installs? How can I do it?
Also, if the pkg-get authors read this newsgroup, a feature that would
be very useful is "remove all packages", so that you can start again
from scratch when your system gets totally messed up.

Secondly, I've been experimenting with Google's Gmail service recently,
and have had two browser problems. [In fact, I'm starting to wonder if
Gmail is more trouble than it's worth, because it only seems to be
compatible with the latest browsers, and the interface has a tendency to
hang, but that's another story.] I have Netscape 7.0 and Mozilla 1.5 on
my system but I can't use Gmail satisfactorily with either.

Mozilla 1.5 complains that SSL is disabled. I've reinstalled Mozilla
twice and erased the /.mozilla directory, but SSL still won't work. The
permissions for the directory are drwxr-xr-x, and I tried changing them
to drwxrwxrwx, but with no luck. My root filesystem has 244 MB of space
free, but surely this would be enough for anything Mozilla needs to
write to disk? I don't believe it's a bug in the browser because it used
to work.

Netscape 7.0 allows me to access Gmail (so presumably its security
component is working), but when I try to reply to an email it hangs. I
wonder if this could be anything to do with me updating my version of
Java? When I installed the web interface to the Solaris Patch Manager it
insisted on updating Java, and I think that was when the problems
started. "java -version" gives the following output:

java version "1.4.2_03"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_03-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2_03-b02, mixed mode)

Curiously, the version of Java which I had before also claims to be
1.4.2_03 (I downloaded it from the Sun website in January). Again, I
don't believe this is a problem with the browser itself because Netscape
used to allow me to access Gmail without it hanging.

As I said, any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Many thanks,

Chris Tidy

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