In most cases it is possible to install applications packaged for a
recent version of Fedora Core or Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Owl.  As of
Owl 2.0 release, this applies to FC3 and RHEL4.

This file lists known issues with using packages from or intended for
Red Hat Linux (Fedora Core, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) on Owl.  The names
of affected Red Hat Linux packages, if applicable and known, are given
in braces.


	Packages providing cron jobs (slocate).

Owl provides the following directories specified by LSB 1.3:

/etc/cron.d
/etc/cron.daily
/etc/cron.weekly
/etc/cron.monthly

It also provides the directory /etc/cron.hourly found on Red Hat
Linux.

Both Red Hat Linux and Owl will only process scripts placed in these
directories if the filenames satisfy certain criteria.  Red Hat Linux
uses a list of taboo suffixes, which includes "~" (editor backup
files), ".rpmsave", ".rpmnew", and a number of others.  Owl uses a
different approach which is to skip over filenames which contain
disallowed characters and most importantly dots ('.'), thereby being
safer against processing undesired files.  Unfortunately, certain Red
Hat Linux packages are known to provide cron job files with dots in
their names.  In particular, this is the case for Red Hat's slocate
package.  The workaround is to rename the files after package
installation.

Owl's behavior is described in man pages for crond(8) and
run-parts(8).


	Device file permissions (mc).

Owl does not provide a pseudo-user "vcsa" (which is capable of direct
access to virtual terminals on Red Hat Linux) and does not make
/dev/ttyp* world-accessible.  These differences from Red Hat Linux are
known to break Ctrl-O and the screensaver in Red Hat's package of
Midnight Commander (mc).  No workaround is recommended; mc needs to be
taught to use Unix98 ptys instead of /dev/ttyp*.


	No pam_console (XFree86, xorg).

Owl does not provide the pam_console module.  Red Hat's packages of
XFree86 X servers are known to provide PAM configuration files which
rely on pam_console.  The workaround is to replace the invocation of
pam_console with invocations of another module suitable for your
particular setup, e.g. with pam_listfile.  You need to replace the
pam_console line in /etc/pam.d/xserver with:

auth       required	pam_listfile.so item=user sense=allow onerr=fail file=/etc/xserver.allow

Then you list the users which need to run X in /etc/xserver.allow.


	No pam_stack by default.

The pam_stack module is deprecated in favor of the "include" directive.
Owl provides this deprecated module in the pam-compat package which is
not installed by default.


	Password checking helpers (xlockmore, xscreensaver).

On Red Hat Linux, the PAM modules' helper programs used to check a
user's own password are world-accessible.  On Owl, they're restricted
to group chkpwd.  This means that certain programs which need the
functionality need to be granted this new privilege.  This is known to
be needed for PAM-aware X screen locking programs such as the one
coming from package xlockmore.  To make it work on Owl, it needs to be
made SGID to group chkpwd, like this:

-rwx--s--x    1 root     chkpwd     751328 Mar 30  2001 /usr/X11R6/bin/xlock

Unfortunately, this trick does not appear to work with the newer
xscreensaver package.  xscreensaver appears to be too smart and drops
its additional privilege.


	No libperl.so (exim, gaim, inn, mod_perl, postgresql-pl, xchat).

The Owl perl package does not provide the libperl.so library.
The workaround is to rebuild packages linked with libperl.so.


	The Owl perl package is not fully compatibile with Red Hat's
	(crypto-utils, foomatic, newt-perl, perl-Net-DNS, perl-XML-LibXML,
	perl-XML-SAX, spamassassin, subversion-perl).

On Red Hat Linux, some packages place their perl-specific files in
directories the names of which depend on Perl version.  These packages
need to be rebuilt to work properly on Owl.


	No rpm-python subpackage (rpm-python, yum).

As we don't provide Python as part of Owl, we also build RPM without
support for Python language bindings.  Moreover, Red Hat's rpm-python
subpackage might not install correctly in conjunction with our main
RPM package due to RPM version differences.


	The Owl slang package is lacking UTF-8 support.

On Red Hat Linux, UTF-8 support is added into S-Lang with a patch.  We
don't do that.  If another package requires S-Lang with UTF-8 support,
the workaround is simply to replace our slang package with Red Hat's.
There are no dependencies on our version of slang within Owl itself.


	No NPTL support in glibc.

Red Hat Linux 9 and above provides the newer Native POSIX Thread Library
(NPTL) in their glibc (C library) package.  We continue to provide the
older LinuxThreads library.  NPTL would require support from the kernel
which we currently do not provide.  This is something that will change
once we move to Linux 2.6.x and drop support for Linux 2.4.x kernels.

We're currently unaware of a Red Hat Linux 9 or any other package
which would fail to work without NPTL.  This is no surprise because
Red Hat Linux itself provides fallback libraries for the case when
support for NPTL is not available in the running Linux kernel, and
their packages are thus meant to work with the non-NPTL libraries as
well.

The one problem we are aware of and have resolved is the source code
for recent versions of RPM requiring NPTL.  We have resolved that
dependency on NPTL in our build of RPM.

$Owl: Owl/doc/REDHAT,v 1.10 2006/02/02 10:20:34 solar Exp $
