Eigerstein and Dachstein have continued to use glibc 2.0 (as does LRP); the most recent version of Oxygen has been using glibc 2.1. Both are already obsoleted by glibc 2.2. If you want your packages to work as widely as possible, compile with glibc 2.0.

These programs are standard UNIX programs, and are present in LRP and older Oxygen versions; the ip program (sometimes refered to as iproute2) replaces all of these. If you write a script which uses any of these commands, you must account for the fact that the commands may not be present.

LRP used Linux 2.0 and later had an add-on package for Linux 2.2. Dachstein and Oxygen have been using Linux 2.2 for a while. Current development is towards using Linux 2.4. This may affect your choices for firewalls and other things. Linux 2.0 used ipfwadm to administrate firewalls; Linux 2.2 shifted to ipchains; Linux 2.4 now shifts to ipfilter. However, Linux 2.4 has modules to allow ipchains and ipfwadm to work with Linux 2.4. All of this must be accounted for.

In actuality, this is a kernel version problem. Firewalls under Linux 2.0 used the ipfwadm utility to control the firewall. Linux 2.2 introduced an entirely new set of tools and firewall design that used something called ipchains. Linux 2.4 introduces yet another new firewall design called iptables. Linux 2.4 iptables offers support for older firewall control commands, even though it is a complete redesign. Whatever firewall tool you use, make sure the kernel supports it.

LRP and Dachstein only come with a stripped down version of ncurses 3. Oxygen came with ncurses 4 initially; later this was moved to an LRP package and then upgraded to ncurses 5. A lot of things require full ncurses, especially editors such as elvis-tiny; also many networking tools with full screen color displays require ncurses. Some programs will require ncurses 5 and will not work with ncurses 4.