Ethereal-users: Re: [ethereal-users] Problems with Ethereal.

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 19:08:33 -0700
On Wed, Apr 19, 2000 at 08:42:17AM -0500, McNutt, Justin M. wrote:
> Found it.  'strings /usr/bin/ethereal' shows that Ethereal is linked to
> libc.so.6 (glibc), which I have yet to get installed.

I now infer from "libc.so.6 (glibc)" that you're running Linux, and that
from "downloaded the .tar.gz binaries" and "which I have yet to get
installed" that you're probably running a pre-glibc version of
Slackware.

The Package Central entry for Ethereal doesn't say for which version of
Slackware the package was built; I have the impression that glibc is a
relatively recent addition to Slackware, so I'm a bit surprised that the
package would be built with glibc.

> I'm going to struggle with that part.  I got it all compiled once, but then
> scrapped it because there were warnings on the glibc HOWTO page suggesting
> that "you don't want glibc-2.1.x as your main library."  Hmmm...

I have the impression that the major commercial distributions, at least,
are using 2.1[.x], of some flavor, so perhaps the HOWTO is either out of
date or excessively conservative.  (Heck, the glibc HOWTO I see on
"www.linuxdoc.org" has a date of 22 June 1998, and says that 2.1 is "due
out in the near future".  Perhaps, given that glibc is used by, I think,
most of the major distributions, the HOWTO for it is no longer
considered important.)

Perhaps the version of Slackware (or whatever other Linux distribution
is on your machine, if it's not Slackware) you have, being libc5-based,
doesn't have sufficiently up-to-date header files, and thus doesn't
define INT_MAX, causing the compile problem with the source
distribution.

> But at least I know why Ethereal (and a couple other things) won't run even
> when the binaries were downloaded.  <whacks forehead>  Grr...

If you are running an older version of Slackware, you might want to
consider upgrading to Slackware 6.0, to get a more modern environment.