Jonathan L Cunningham wrote:
> [Question 0: how could I have found
> out I already had Lesstif?]
"rpm -q Lesstif" will tell you if there's an installed package called
Lesstif. "rpm -q -a" will give you a list of all installed packages, so
if you pipe it through "grep tif" you can find out about Motif, Lesstif
or any other variant of this overstretched pun.
> (1) Does it matter? Should I replace the Lesstif with Motif?
I am definitely not an authority in this area. As far as I'm aware,
Poplog is the only program on my machine that uses Motif. I installed
it after Aaron posted an announcement about a free version on this list,
and it Just Worked. Previous to that, I had installed what I thought
was the latest version of Lesstif at the time, and it didn't work
(RedHat 6.0, circa 1999). I can't remember the content of the error
messages, but they were sufficiently daunting to make me think I had
better things to do with my time.
Since my system was working ok before I installed Lesstif, I felt fairly
safe in removing it when it turned out to be unhelpful for Poplog. You
may be in a different position. "rpm -e --test Lesstif" (don't really
remove Lesstif, but print out what you would say if I asked you to
remove it) will tell you what other packages on your machine depend on
Lesstif. If there aren't any, or they are ones you know you don't care
about, then you might as well get rid of it and try Motif. Otherwise,
you have to recurse to find out how deep the dependency on Lesstif goes.
If there are packages depending on Lesstif that you know you want, but
not too many, and they don't in turn have lots of dependents, you could
try removing them and then reinstalling after you have installed Motif.
In my experience with rpm, it has always been possible to return to the
original state if necessary after such experiments. I've always been
able to reinstall things I've removed and no harm done. (I've never
used rpm's --force option to remove things it doesn't want to remove - I
imagine you can make quite a mess that way if you put your mind to it.)
> [1] I already had a very old Slackware (I think) unix on an old 486,
> but it only has 16MB of RAM, which is not enough to run X-Windows
> and also applications at the same time.
Just for the record, I can run X and poplog simultaneously on my 486
with 16MB RAM (and swap space, under muLinux). I didn't link X into the
libc5 poplog, to keep the size down, so I don't know how Xved would
behave.
Steve
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