Hi! With today's release of Red Hat 8.0 there are significantly excellent changes to Red Hat to make life with multithreaded programs, like AOLserver, more convenient.
1) gcc-3.2 is used exclusively throughout Red Hat 8.0. This means that C89, C99, C++, ANSI C++, and friends will work together in harmony as AOLserver shared objects. Please note that there is an inconsistency in the Red Hat 8.0 release notes that claims that the C++ ABI will change in future releaes, but this directly contradicts the actual GCC 3.2 release notes that state clearly that the C++ ABI will not change in future releases. If you're a C++ head be sure to watch out for this but it's probably as easy as keeping your code easy for other people to recompile. 2) Multithreaded program support is getting better and better! The top and ps commands now only display the main (initial) thread of thread-aware processes. To show all threads, use the command ps -m or type H in top. 3) gdb seems to know what it's doing with multithreaded programs and core dumps--I think the jury is still out on this one. 4) The version of Tcl does not have thread support enabled so AOLserver 3.5 users will need to build their own copy of Tcl with "--enable-threads --enable-shared". At runtime, AOLserver at this time does not "detect" that a proper version of Tcl with threads is installed but it's likely we can do this in a future release for all systems. 5) Long ago the default file descriptor limit on Linux was made configurable even if you don't have a 64-bit system. The default Linux installaion has about three zillion times more file descriptors than even Solaris 9. 6) ns_sendmail will work as long as you use "localhost" or "127.0.0.1" as your smtphost. Red Hat 8 only listens on localhost for security reasons. 7) OpenSSL should be rebuilt according to the documentation that comes with nsopenssl, otherwise nsopenssl will not recognize it. That's all I can think of right now. In the meantime, download Red Hat 8.0 and tell us what you think! Kris
