Re: No more free non-security patches == No more Mozilla, Firefox, KDE etc. / was: Re: Sun Management Smokes Crack, Goes Bonkers

From: Dave Uhring (daveuhring_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 03/24/05 

Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 18:22:12 -0600

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 00:51:32 +0100, Roland Mainz wrote:

> Dave Uhring wrote:

>> No, and it was not the case for Solaris 8 or 9. Roland's builds of
>> Firefox, at least those built with gtk1, ran as well on Solaris as on
>> Linux using only the publicly available recommended patch clusters for
>> Solaris.
>
> Erm... depends... some of the iconv patches were not available for the
> public until very recently when Sun simply made all patches available
> (asian users have a very very bad experience about those patches not
> being available, rendering Gecko (Mozilla, Firefox etc.) application
> useless in those locales).

Sorry, I cannot speak for Asian users. My locale is en_US.

> Anyway... newer versions of Mozilla/Firefox have a patch checker script
> which checks the installed patches. Either they are all installed or you
> get a WARNING dialog (I am talking about this little monster:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=144824). You may either
> dismiss&ignore the dialog and start Mozilla (and get malfunctions (even
> data loss is possible)) or click on "Exit" and install the patches.
> Problems will arise when Sun locks away those patches. Sun did that in
> Solaris 7 and for AROUND HALF A YEAR people had to grab either a patch
> from a unoffical place looked-up via Google or were not able to launch
> Mozilla (this disaster finally resulted in the development of the
> Solaris patch checker script to make Mozilla users aware that
> Mozilla.org is not resposible for that mess).

Hmm, I installed Firefox-1.0.1 on Solaris 10 SPARC and never saw such a
warning. Currently I'm running Firefox-1.0 on s10_b72 SPARC and it works
quite well. Thank you, BTW.

The reason I'm using s10_b72 is that gtk2 apps in Solaris 10 have a
serious problem rendering fonts properly. It's time for a reinstall of
Solaris 10 with no GNOME.

> The same mess applies to Qt/KDE applications, too.
>
>> The comment about KDE is hyperbole also.
>
> Thanks. Just for the log: No, they don't work without some patches. See
> below...

[duhring]$ ps -ef | grep kmail
 duhring 774 1 0 Mar 21 pts/7 7:37 kmail
 duhring 1697 450 0 18:06:57 pts/5 0:00 grep kmail

>> I have been running KDE apps
>> and, occasionally, KDE itself on Solaris since Solaris 8 FCS using the Sun
>> supplied Xsun Xserver and X11 libraries.
>
> That can only apply to Qt/KDE applications build with gcc. If you are
> using any C++ applications build with Sun Workshop/Forte then you need
> at least the C++ runtime library patches which are not part of Solaris 8
> FCS. And with newer Sun Forte compilers even Solaris 9 FCS is not
> sufficient - you need the C++ runtime patches + libm and libc patches as
> well.

I cannot afford Sun's price for the Workshop/Forte/Studio or whatever they
call it today compilers. Binaries generated with gcc3 may be larger and
slower but they do work.

Relevant Pages

  • s and S run levels
    ... Please find the below run level in solaris. ... Solaris 10 recommended patches (Brent) ... prstat 99% more info ... Sun StorEdge DAT 72 Tape Drive ...
    (SunManagers)
  • Re: Sun Management Smokes Crack, Goes Bonkers
    ... > If you're happy to only get security patches, and then have the ability to ... It's a good compromise if you're Sun and you're looking to find ways ... in order to get to the point where they will try Solaris. ...
    (comp.unix.solaris)
  • Re: pathetic patches
    ... install the Solaris 10 Recommended Patch Cluster a couple of times ... Almost all patches gave a return status of 45 - ... After that I gave up trying to patch Solaris 10 ... follows every attempt to install Solaris 10 patches... ...
    (comp.unix.solaris)
  • Available immdeate Vijay for Unix Admin with sun Solories Expireance.@217-241-2015
    ... 6+ years of professional IT experience in Unix System Administrator ... implementation, connectivity and maintenance on Sun Solaris, Veritas ... User Administration, ...
    (comp.unix.admin)
  • Re: patchadd on Solaris 10 fcs release
    ... I'm facing installation error for same patch with same commands ... Suggest me how to overcome this error in solaris 10 or any altarnative ... from the observation that I had patches for Studio 11 fail in Solaris ...
    (comp.unix.solaris)