in reply to approaches to debugging a platform-dependant bug

First step of all steps would be to get an accurate error description. Maybe you have it already, but I think it would help if you shared that error description with us.

From what I've seen, there are some problems with the locale set on Red Hat systems - I think that Red Hat exports LANG=en_US.utf8 or something like that which has given people grief. Maybe deleting that entry from the environment or setting it to "C" or something like that helps.

As a general idea, I'd go for one of the many virtualization packages and run Red Hat in a virtual machine - almost every modern operating system offers virtual machines to contain other operating systems.

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Re^2: approaches to debugging a platform-dependant bug
by bcrowell2 (Friar) on Apr 09, 2006 at 18:20 UTC
    You're of course completely correct about getting the exact error message, and I'm an idiot for not having that handy. I've e-mailed one of the red hat users to ask him for the specific error message.

    Your idea about $LANG is interesting. What I'm doing is this: 

    if (exists $ENV{LANG}) {
  $ENV{LANG} =~ m/^(..)/;
  $preferences{'language'} = lc($1);
}

    [download]
    So if red hat sets it to "en_US.utf8", it seems that the language would still be correctly recognized as "en". However, I think it's very likely that something along the lines of what you're saying must be the problem. Just on general principles, I should probably also do more error checking and sanity checking on the language code I'm extracting from $LANG.
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