From: Bogdan Costescu (Bogdan.Costescu_at_IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De)
Date: Thu Feb 09 2006 - 10:51:55 CST

On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, John Stone wrote:

> The 32-bit builds of VMD are done on a Redhat 9 box, which is as old
> as I can go (and even this, I had to beg our sysadmin not to upgrade
> it even with the obvious security issues that RH9 has).

How about changing to CentOS-3 ? This costs nothing, is very similar
to RH9 (IMHO RHEL3 is some cross between RH9 and FC1) and is updated
by the CentOS team including security-wise. Plus that Tru is also part
of the CentOS team, specifically the CentOS-3 part :-)

If you really want to go even more backwards, then how about
CentOS-2.1 ? This is based on RHEL-2.1 sources which are based on the
RH 7.x releases which seem to still be preferred by a lot of people.

[ Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with the CentOS project. I am only a
user. ]

> I may have to distribute two different 32-bit builds of VMD 1.8.4,
> one build on RH9, and one built on RHEL4.

I'm actually contemplating putting all 3 present CentOS versions in
VMWare "containers" to allow me to compile using the different
libraries and compilers and compare the results; in my case, there is
no graphics involved, so I could even run in these virtual machines.
For graphics (as in the case of VMD using OpenGL), this is still
different than running in these 3 environments on real hardware, but I
think that it is better than compiling in one and just hope for the
best in the others.

With VMWare (or some other virtualization software), you don't need to
ask your sysadmin for anything. You can be the syadmin... if these are
only used for compilation tests, then they don't need any complex
configuration.

-- 
Bogdan Costescu
IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu_at_IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De