Working in a software firm with its baseline support at Redhat 7.2 certainly is hard - you have to make do with several apps that are old or forgo them altogether.

For all its opensource cred, Firefox 2.0 doesnt have an out-of-the-box build that works on Glibc 2.1 . However, Opera 9 does (praise their souls). And once you opera.. you never go back… well I think I have harped on Opera far too many times.

But there is one app that I  have to use and yet has no Glibc 2.1 version - Thunderbird. So the problem arose - how shall the twain come to meet?

Compile your own glibc 2.3 - hmm.. but I dont have root permissions, how do I use it and still use 2.1 for my company work.

aha… but therein lies the trick.

Actually the thunderbird executable that we run, is in fact a script  - so we need to insert the appropriate ld.so in between. But lets not get ahead of ourselves.

To compile Glibc-2.3 for Redhat 7.2 - we will pick the Glibc 2.3.2 revision (glibc-2.3.2.tar.bz2).  After this revision, compiler idiosyncracies dont allow Glibc to be built on Redhat 7.2. In addition, we must also pick the corresponding glibc-linuxthreads revision - glibc-linuxthreads-2.3.2.tar.bz2

unzip the glibc package. unzip the linuxthreads package inside the glibc directory and build

 ./configure —prefix=/home/sss —enable-add-ons=linuxthreads,linuxthreads_db

make

make install

Now, you end up with $INSTALLPATH/lib/ld-2.3.2.so.

voila

./run-mozilla.sh  release//lib/ld-2.3.2.so —library-path release/lib:.:/usr/lib:/usr/X11R6/lib:/usr/local/lib ./thunderbird-bin

Incidentally, Thunderbird has been relegated to the bin by the Mozilla foundation . I suppose with Google putting millions of dollars into Mozilla, they did not really want to spend money on Thunderbird - what with Gmail and all (*wink..wink*)