Thanks Sam Varshavchik for your help. First of all, this testosterone-laded ubergeek as you said is a well known router expert, Michael J Martin. He wrote several in depth tutorials on routing and switching for
searchnetworking.techtarget.com. I am working on one of his projects; Building a WLAN proxy server. Now I am not saying that he is wrong. I would rather take this responsibility on myself and say that my experience in Linux is nothing compared to him. It's true that I have very little experience in compiling and installing software(I've done Kernel several time). There are a lot of people who compile and install their software and that does not mean it's a wrong practice or they all had problems.
You are right however when you said I did not understand what was broken at the fundamental level. I did not understand why libssl.so.5 was that important. Now I know why it's important for the utilities I mentioned.
I have seen from my google search that other people with Fedora Core 5 also have this error message. The question is whether openssl-0.9.8 is installed with FC5 and if it's not this libssl.a file the real problem. What if I don't choose openssl from my initial installation? Will there be any encryption available with Yum, rpm, wget, etc.? Thanks anyway for your precious time.
Thanks Cameron. Yes I probably made a mistake by using --prefix /usr. I have taken note and if I compile things again I'll use the directories you mentioned.
Thanks Paul for your help. I realize now that I used rpm -e --nodeps blindly. This option avoids dependency check. Rpm has been smarter than me ,-)
Cheers
David
