Linux Kernal 2.4

I had originally posted this in the newbie section. I am a novice with linux so i hope this will not be out of scope reposted here. I have done various searches on the internet and on LQ.

My originbal problem was that i was getting a message on my terminal screen that went as follows.

$ethereal: Symbol "pcap_version" has different size in shared object, consider re-linking

This was not causing me any problems the program would run and the data would flow nicely into the buffer. So my original question was what was re-linking and how might i achieve that?

I figured being from a netware background that perhaps a patch might achieve the same thing so i went to ethereals website and found an rpm package which is version 0.10.0a. I have downloaded this package and issued the following commands.

su root
#rpm Uvv ethereal-0.10.0a-1.RH9.src.rpm

this generated the following report.

[root@dtbir3870 downloads]# rpm -Uvv ethereal-0.10.0a-1.RH9.src.rpm
D: ============== ethereal-0.10.0a-1.RH9.src.rpm
D: Expected size: 4390949 = lead(96)+sigs(180)+pad(4)+data(4390669)
D: Actual size: 4390949
D: ethereal-0.10.0a-1.RH9.src.rpm: MD5 digest: OK (e5fa76c2814e4602a1720ffe2dbeb6b8)
D: added source package [0]
D: found 1 source and 0 binary packages
D: Expected size: 4390949 = lead(96)+sigs(180)+pad(4)+data(4390669)
D: Actual size: 4390949
ethereal-0.10.0a-1.RH9
D: ========== Directories not explictly included in package:
D: 0 /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/
D: 1 /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/
D: ==========
D: fini 100644 1 ( 0, 0) 4388176 /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/ethereal-0.10.0a.tar.bz2;4015100e
D: fini 100644 1 ( 0, 0) 7243 /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/ethereal-net-snmp-0.10.0a.spec;4015100e
GZDIO: 537 reads, 4395824 total bytes in 0.097 secs

I then rebooted the system typed ethereal & only to find i am still running the same version 0.9.8

so i then issued the command

# rpm -ivv ethereal-0.10.0a-1.RH9.src.rpm

I get exactly the same screen as above but i still have the old version installed not the new one. i cannot seem to see any errors in the report, Again i emphasise this post perhaps should not be here as i am a complete novice. If that is the case then i appologise in advanced.

best
barry

If the rpm name has .src in it, this is the uncompiled version. If you look at the output above, it indicates that the source code that needs to be compiled is in /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES. It looks like it puts a file there that also needs further processing. To avoid all the hassle, download:
ethereal-base-0.10.0a-1.RH9.i386.rpm
This is the compiled version. Expect that you may have some dependency errors beyond that.