It's obvious by now that both the pro and regular version of LimeWire for Linux is suffering from some very serious problems.

I got a call yesterday from a tech guy after I had posted several times in the sticky forum. Also, I have e-mailed directly to another tech guy for advice. The one guy said he had to get a person "familiar with Linux" to look at my output. Meanwhile I got an explanation.

Basically, if I understand the situation correctly, there is something in the way SELinux and Fedora Core 3 reacts with some scripts in LimeWire.

For example, when java is installed in any folder other than where the LimeWIre script expects it to be, there is a fault which says, java isn't there. Then the install script searchs and if it is present in another directory, finds java and tries to use it. There is a permissions problem there, evidently.

Next, the issue of having to open a super user terminal window and type "limewire" to start the GUI LimeWire has something to do with the SELinux configuration. For example, before I got LimeWire Pro and completely hosed my system, I could actually start two LimeWIre episodes at the same time (naturally). One by opening a superuser terminal and running LimeWire as root and then going to a non-su terminal and running another LimeWire as user. Both settings were different, of course. We don't want to be running LimeWire as root in my opinion under any circumstances.

Wiping the system clean of all LimeWIre and all Java is also problematic. There seems to be code or scripts left behind (just like Windows and those unused dll's and other registry orphans) which tell the new installation that there is already an installation present. None of the usual "use rpm to remove" stuff works, since the LimeWire package evidently sends off scripts which are no longer identifiable as part of the rpm package to be removed using the rpm removal routine. Even doing a find for anything with the "java" and "limewire" in it and then deleting all of those items didn't work.

By the way, when I ran the free LimeWIre as root it worked perfectly the first time except for periodic crashes due to java exceptions.

Tomorrow I am going to build a Fedora _2_ box as a test bed. I will limit the installation to a basic KDE FC2 box. I will d/l java and install and then d/l the free LimeWire and install .. both going exactly as the directions state.

I'll report back here if that is a success.

My expectation is that when LimeWIre is installed there should be either an icon on the desktop or a line in the "applications" popup just like there is when kaffeine is installed, for example.

Meanwhile I think we ought to give the LimeWire techies a rest and not keep posting that our LimeWire Pro fails to work. We all know it doesn't work, so we just have to sit back and let them fix it. They evidently are working overtime trying to fix this problem for us Linux people and we should give them credit for that.