Pulling my hair out

[birddawg]

I sorry if this has been asked before, but I searched and did not find an answer.
I have Redhat 7.1 installed(7.1 or 7.2) on a machine and
1) this is the only OS installed on the machine, how do I find out which version of Redhat I'm running.
2) I tried to install sndconfig and it errored stating that it needed sox. So I tried installing sox only to have it error stating that it needed GLIBC2.2.3. When I tried to install GLIBC, it stalled because it conflicted with GLIBC_Dev.  What does a person do.  Seems like a dog that chases his tail.
3) What is the difference in LILO and GRUB.  Am I using LILO at all since this a non-partioned HDA.  How do I find out.
Sorry about all the newbie questions, but this seemed the only choice for the proper forum.

[voidmain]

1) There are many ways to tell what version of RedHat you are running but what I usually do it type "cat /etc/issue" or "cat /proc/version".

2) You will not get version mismatches if you are installing the "sndconfig" and "glibc" from the same CD that the system was installed from (or from rpmfind.net as long as you pick the packages for the same RedHat version). glibc is a collection of C/system libraries. Like many packages there is also a glibc-devel package. The "devel" packages are header files that allow you to write applications and compile them using the glibc libraries.  The "devel" packages are not necessary to just run an already compiled application that uses glibc.  However, the version numbers on the glibc and the glibc-devel much match exactly.

It appears that you already have glibc and glibc-devel installed and you are trying to install a "sndconfig" package that is compiled against a different version.  Get the proper "sndconfig" package for your distribution and you should be able to install it without any dependency issues.

3) LILO and GRUB are both boot managers capable of booting multiple operating systems.  LILO has always been the most commonly used boot loader over the last 10 years.  GRUB is fairly new and may be a little easier to use and now the default boot loader in RedHat and other distros.  But they both do very similar things.

[Tonerman]

LILO boots multiple OS's? How... My friend has LILO RH 6.2(I think) and win98 on the same comp.. but it always loads windows by default.. and I tried to configure LILO to load the Linux partition by default.. but... didn't do anything...

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Tonerman:
LILO boots multiple OS's? How... My friend has LILO RH 6.2(I think) and win98 on the same comp.. but it always loads windows by default.. and I tried to configure LILO to load the Linux partition by default.. but... didn't do anything...

Are you getting the "LILO:" prompt when you boot your computer?  If it goes straight into windows without seeing the "LILO:" prompt then you did not install LILO at the beginning of the drive.  You may have installed it at the beginning of a partition, but if so it wasn't the "active" partition.  I usually install it at the beginning of the first drive "/dev/hda".  If you want to make a change to the LILO configuration you modify "/etc/lilo.conf".  To make the changes active you run the "/sbin/lilo" command.

Hope that helps..

[birddawg]

Thanks guys for the reply,  I did something very bad yesterday.  I uninstalled several library packages without checking for dpendencies.  I now get a "kernal panic" at boot up.  This is just a learning experience for me, I'm trying to transition to Linux. So mistakes will be made and this was a learned the hard way.  I decided just to start over with a new install.  I bought Redhat 7.3  and shall go from there.  BTW, the installation gave me the option to load GRUB or LILO and I chose GRUB. Linux is a good looking OS but you sure can do a lot of damage as root.  Thanks

[voidmain]

GRUB is fine, the config file for that is /boot/grub/menu.lst. But again, be careful as a mistake could mean you will not be able to boot your system without a boot disk, have one ready in case you do make a mistake.