On the Developer Blog entry "The return of Puppy2!" -
The issue of glibc is complex. Some knowledgeable person on the forum recently mentioned that for maximum compatibility and stability in Linux all applications and libraries should be compiled under the same version of glibc. We all knew that this was true of kernel modules, and to a lesser extent; Xorg and GTK2. But everything else?ttuuxxx wrote:Flash is terrible, The glibC is outdated and I can't update that, or it will cripple the who OS.
This was something I had always suspected might be true, and I now believe it. But there's no point getting too fussed about complete glibc compatibility. Puppy already has a mish-mash of utilities carried over from earlier versions. I should know: I contributed the wpa_supplicant application used in the current Puppy 4.2. But it was introduced somewhere in the (Slackware 10-compatible) Puppy 3 series.
So back to Flash. I can't speak for the current version of Flash, but back when I was helping pakt and Dougal build 214R we had a similar warning about glibc ... but this was just an installer script warning.
Personally I hate installer scripts anyway. All we had to do was manually extract the Flash binaries and place them in the correct location. Flash then worked fine.
So glibc compatibility is desirable, but not necessarily essential.
More to the point: some modern applications won't compile under older versions of glibc.
But then many modern applications won't compile under older versions of GTK2.
And if you upgrade glibc, and GTK2, then you might as well upgrade the kernel and Xorg! Then Puppy 2 isn't Puppy 2 any more.
There was planned to be an update to Puppy 214R called Minipup216, with a significantly different suite of applications. For this release I compiled XMMS 1.2.11 and pakt tested it quite thoroughly. He didn't find any bugs. It's available as a dotpet herettuuxxx wrote:Gtk1.2 is still useful for some older apps like Xmms, but it ran buggy on 2.14X so I removed it
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=26528
I should point out that the Xorgwizard in 214R was completely overhauled by Dougal. It's the only version of Puppy which offers the correct resolution of 1280x1024 as the default value for my 17 inch LCD monitor.