Users of Fedora Core 4, SuSE 10.0 and other distributions with GCC v4 may have found some open source softwares may not compile properly. Using alternate compilers may resolve the problem. FC4 also ships with GCC v3.2. There are many ways to specify alternate compilers during the build process, below are some ways. Environment Variables Most softwares support the CC and CXX environment variables. First assign them, then run configure or make.

The purpose of this article is to explain the potential problems in installing every package that comes included in any given Linux distribution. For the most part, this is a bad practice and is not conducive to becoming proficient in Linux for either a seasoned professional or a newcomer (ie. “newbie”). It is my hope that this will help educate people on this subject matter. There are some abundancy arguments that are commonly used and overstated.

EDIT (Dec 19, 2005): I have written a formal guide on PHP4 on FC4. As a followup to my previous post about PHP4 on FC4, I decided to abandon PHP5 altogether. I spent some time to try and get the PHP4 src.rpm from FC3 to compile correctly in FC4. As it turned out neither the GCC4 nor the GCC3.2 included in FC4 would compile everything properly. So I decided to try GCC3.

I had written a really simple camera mini-guide for how I use my Canon S500 digital camera in Fedora Core 3. The other night I decided to update and make sure everything still works in Fedora Core 4 - and it did. Guides like these, to me, are almost not necessary. I would tell someone, just make sure you have Gnome and gPhoto and your USB setup and your camera will “automagically” work.

Quite possibly the most useful Linux and Fedora forums on the internet are LinuxQuestions.org and FedoraForum. I prefer the first one since it has been around much longer and has a great deal more content for Linux in general (not just Fedora). However the second one has been dubbed the “official support forum” for Fedora, so I guess it will have quite a good number of helpful people as well. Of course, my main gripe with forums in general is having to continuously checking for updates on threads, making sure you ask the “right questions” and dealing with arrogant admins.