[PLUG] PLUG Digest, Vol 62, Issue 89

[Dale Snell]

On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:57:17 -0800
John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:

> I was so bummed at Debian and all the problems I have had with it that
> last night I installed Fedora 12. As expected, package management
> sucks compared to what I have been used to in Ubuntu. But otherwise
> it is very nice and I have not had a single major problem so far. And
> I note that it installed Grub 0.97, not even 1.5 that has been out
> for a long time.

The Fedora people do sometimes use older versions of programs.
Evidently they think the newer ones are not ready for prime time.
For example, Fedora 10 still uses Firefox 3.0, even though 3,5 has been
out for quite a while.  Their version of groff is still stuck at v1.18,
even though v1.20 has been out for almost a year.

I'm glad that your Fedora 12 installation went well.  I tried it the
other day, and it got horribly confused at the last moment.  It got all
the way through the installation process, but when I rebooted, it
showed me a login screen, instead of the final "Welcome to Fedora 12"
page.  It wouldn't let me log in, either; it couldn't recognize the
root password.  I wound up having to go back to Fedora 10.  Thank
goodness for backups!  I've never had this trouble before, so I suspect
that something was awry with my dvd.

> As I educate myself to the RPM way of doing things, I am hoping that
> the package management suckage will diminish. Fedora 12 does come with
> a nice GUI Add/Remove Packages utility, but it's not nearly as fully
> featured as Synaptic. I need to figure out repositories; that is, I
> assume there is a sources.list file somewhere, but I need to figure
> out where there are other repositories and how to add them. That will
> be today's educational adventure.

I don't know of any master list of repositories, though to be honest
I've never gone looking for one.  The main repositories that I use,
aside from Fedora's, are RPMFusion and Adobe.  RPMFusion
(<http://rpmfusion.org>) has a lot of stuff that Fedora won't carry,
due to patent or licensing issues. Things like MP3 and DVD codecs and
such.  Adobe, of course, is where you get the Adobe Flash plug-in for
Firefox.

If I may suggest, download a copy of Yumex (as root, type: "yum install
yumex").  Yumex is a GUI for yum that is, imho, much nicer than the
default GUI that comes with Fedora.  It's very nice for perusing the
repositories.  Between Yumex and the updates setup that Fedora
installs, you should be able to keep up to date with a minimum of fuss.

--Dale

--
Q:	What lies on the bottom of the ocean and twitches?
A:	A nervous wreck.