[Xastir-Dev] Succes: Xastir on Old RedHat 5.2 system

[Henk de Groot]

Hello,

I bought a new harddisk for my laptop and my old 486 laptop got the old 
disk. Now I re-installed RedHat 5.2 from a backup on the 486 laptop and 
tried to compile and run Xastir on it. This system used to run Xastir in 
the past but I moved to a newer laptop and to SuSE quite some time ago.

I installed the latest CVS version. The only difficulty I ran into is to 
get the autoconf stuff working. The .RPM's I had for autoconf and automake 
worked fine, except that they required Perl version >= 5.005 and this RH 
system had only 5.004. There are no Perl RPM's for a systems with an and 
old GLIBC library and I couldn't load a newer GLIBC since my 2.0.36 kernel 
is too old. So I compiled Perl 5.6.1 from a TAR-ball. After that I could 
execute the bootstrap script, I only got a few errors on the m4 macro 
compiler (also too old) but it still produced a working "configure" script.

After running "configure" and "make" it produced a working copy of Xastir. 
The only thing that is missing is that AX.25 for the old kernel and tools 
has been dropped, but the good old "aprs_tty" program could solve that.

I'm very impressed that it still compiled and ran without problems on this 
old system, even more because development went on and nobody ever tried to 
compile and run it on such an old Linux version anymore. Even better, with 
older copies the ImageMagick stuff never worked for me on this system, but 
it does work now!

Anyway, you can put RedHat 5.2 in to the list of systems on which Xastir 
works, although on needs to install a few new packages; not only autoconf, 
automake and perl but also a lot of newer packages as  mentioned in the 
INSTALL file.

Kind regards,

Henk.