I was going to do some development using Sybase.  The good news is that you 
can download their developer edition gratis.   It seems to be for Red Hat.  
Too bad I'm running SuSE 8.1  



The dependencies are:


Need                 Have
kernel 2.4.7-10      2.4.19  
glibc 2.2.4-13       2.2.5-184
rpm 4.0.3-1.03       3.0.6
XFree86 4.1.0-3      4.2.0-176


So I rpm the core package for Sybase 12.5 and it immediately complains that it 
needs kernel 2.4.7 or higher! (??)  I visit to fsf.org shows that the current 
stable linux kernel is 2.4.22 or so.  Presumably 2.4.19 > 2.4.7 and should 
work.



Well, it Sybase says its RPM needs rpm-4.0.3 or better, maybe that's it.   

Time to start looking.  Nope.  SuSE didn't bundle rpm 4.0.x with 8.1.  In 
fact, searching at SuSE seems to indicate SuSE ain't using rpm-4.0.x nohow.  
SuSE *likes* rpm-3.0.x.  Vigorous Goole searching turns up an rpm for 
rpm-4.0.x at rpm.org.  Naturally, rpm.org only seems to deliver code in rpms.  
I can't find a tarball.

Good, lets download it.  More dependencies (argh!).  Now I need:

#shadow-utils   is needed by rpm-4.0.3-7x
    SuSE *never* uses shadow-utils, they call their functional equivalent 
'shadow'.  Notes on the web do *not* bode well for installing shadow-utils on 
a SuSE system.

#popt = 1.6.3 is needed by rpm-4.0.3-7x
#libpopt.so.0   is needed by rpm-4.0.3-7x

SuSE isn't using popt-1.6.3 yet so I go get popt-1.7 and install it from the 
tarball.  It creates /usr/local/lib/libpopt.so.0 as a sym-link to 
libpopt.so.000.  Rpm-4.0.3-7x still can't find it.  I tell Yast to remove the 
old version of popt, damn the dependencies.  Some SuSE dependent programs 
that need popt can no longer find it.  It hasn't helped, the Rpm-4.0.3 still 
can't find popt-1.6.3 or higher.

#patch < 2.5 conflicts with rpm-4.0.3-7x

I don't know what this means, but I bet it's looking for something peculiar to 
RedHat.

=================

Help sought, comiseration accepted.