Running nedit on AIX 4.3

[Andrew Hood]

A: It makes the logic hard to follow.
Q: What's wrong with top posting?

Michael Abdow wrote:
> I updated the motif libraries on the AIX 4.3 machine in question, and it
> now reports:
> 
>   X11.adt.motif              4.3.2.0  COMMITTED  AIXwindows Application
>                                                  Development Toolkit
> Motif 
>   X11.motif.lib             4.3.3.75  COMMITTED  AIXwindows Motif
> Libraries 
>   X11.motif.mwm             4.3.3.75  COMMITTED  AIXwindows Motif Window
>   X11.samples.apps.motifdemos
>                              4.3.2.0  COMMITTED  AIXwindows Sample Motif
> Demos
> 
> (I didn't update the X11.adt.motif package, do I need to?)

Yes. The adt needs to match the libs. You probably don't need the
X11.samples.apps.motifdemos, but they should match too.

> I recompiled nedit, and now I get this error when I run:
> 
> Could not load program ./nedit 
> Symbol dlsym in /usr/lib/libXm.a is undefined
> Could not load library libXm.a[shr_32.o]
> Error was: Exec format error

This is caused by libraries not matching. There probably should have
been a warning about incompatible versions - not necessarily X11
related, more likely libc. smitty can install all necessary prerequisites.

> I check /usr/lib/libXm.a which is a symlink to
> /usr/lpp/X11/lib/R6/Motif2.1/libXm.a, and run:
> 
> 
>>nm libXm.a | grep dlsym
> 
> .dlsym               T     151196
> .dlsym               t     151196      40
> dlsym                U          -
> dlsym                d     255784       4
> 
> and find that the symbol is present?
> 
> I'm not very experienced when it comes to systems admin on AIX. After
> upgrading libraries, do I need to force a refresh or something along
> those lines? Could the old libraries still be getting in the way?

It is possible. Good practice is to reboot after applying patches.

> As for patching to the latest RML. Even though I don't know what an RML
> is :) the reason I probably won't is because we use this machine for
> software development, and it mirrors a machine used by one of our
> customers. Since we need to ensure some commonality, I'm reluctant to do
> any major software updates on our development side.

Recommended Maintenance Level.

You have suggested to the client they need to upgrade to a supported AIX
haven't you?

All AIX 4.x versions are unsupported. 5.1 has an end-of-life date this
year. IIRC 5.2 end-of-life is next year. You will need to confirm later
versions than 4.3.3 will run on their hardware.

-- 
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
                -- Dr. Who