I’m spending most of this afternoon slowly unravelling whatever went wrong with upgrading one of our boxes from Red Hat 7.3 to Red Hat 9. Main problem: none of Red Hat’s GUI administration tools work—they all die with segmentation faults. Neither did sendmail (which I promptly booted out in favor of postfix.)

In the process of straightening everything out, I installed apt-rpm. We’ll see if that makes the system slightly more administerable (is that a verb noun?).

The mystery deepens. Apparently, somehow the PyGNOME installation is hosed. However, it's only intermittently hosed; most of the Red Hat admin tools segfault, but some don't (they're just oddly buggy, like the Package tool that won't let you select things in the Details view). And Foomatic-GUI runs just fine (once wget is installed—no, don't ask me why). Damn strange.