Slashdot Mirror

You can also use apt with rpms - and very nice it is too. Works very well.

These programs have large lists of software and automatically download and install the program and all its dependencies when you request an installation. They also can figure out what updates you need and automatically install them.

There are few programs they don't have, and when you find a program they don't have you can usually get the dependencies pretty easily through red carpet or synaptic

well, this is more like a "redhat rpm" problem than linux itself, but anyway. use apt from freshrpms. After you install the apt rpm, you can simply type apt-get install [package_name]
If there's any dependency, apt tells you which are and asks if you want to d/l them too.
it's a real lifesaver (from rpm dependency hell, anyway) hope that helps

Go here. Download apt for redhat. Then download another package called synaptic. Synaptic gives you a graphical lay-over for apt-get to run on redhat. I'm sure there are some incompatibilities somewhere, but this is the easiest way to get away from dependancy hell in Redhat.

If you are running an RPM based distro, it's here or here.

So, Red Hat want to change its marketing and development strategy? Faster pace for more up to date software? .They should embrace apt or at least provide a similar distribution system (client and server as open-source and free).

If Red Hat wants its distribution to be embraced for the desktop, they must provide a way for people to discover and install apps easily. apt with synaptic is the answer. If there were repositories of 3rd party software available, people could easily install software.

Yes, apt already exist for Red Hat, but the movement is sorta underground since its not the official distribution channel. Only a few sites like freshrpms supports apt. up2date is only wired to their repository, limiting seriously the choice of apps available for download.

Currently, Grandma must download an rpm, start a term and do rpm -Uhv to install it. Not fantastic (ok, there might be some 3rd party gui to do this, but none is standard). If there is one thing I am envious from the Debian distribution, it is its huge number of repositories available and that apt is the standard way of installing software.

A custom redhat install + apt-get = linux perfection

Their apt-gettable repository forms a really up to date exo-distro around Redhat where you can get the latest stuff that installs easily and 'just works'.

The nForce2 is a nice chipset but their Linux drivers leave much to be desired, like working audio and firewire.

I've been using ALSA for audio. Freshrpms.net has ALSA (and other goodies) in convenient RPMs. I haven't tried using the FireWire port but everything else works. And it's trivial to run 400MHz FSB, regardless of your CPUs official spec. I'm running a 1700+ at 7.5x404MHz. MemTest86 verified the configuration.

I use apt as well. :)

Just install Xine. Download and install the Windows DLLs. Done. Now you can play QuickTime files, and even QuickTime webcasts (not to mention Windows Media, because those DLLs contain the required codecs). Heck, if you install RealPlayer9 for *NIX, you can also play Real Media in Xine.
If you install the gxine interface, not xine-ui (but you can install as many interfaces at the same time as you like) you even get a Mozilla plugin to play all those formats in your browser. ;-)
For the lazy, Red Hat RPM packages are here: freshrpms.net.
No emulation (Wine or otherwise) required.

> And, with no "apt-get dist-upgrade" equivalent,

What are you talking about?
http://apt.freshrpms.net/
Works like a charm.

for a lot of the desktop stuff when you want the latest and greatest you might well be thinking "need to upgrade want cool new evolution want funky new KDE 4" within 12 months anyway

Exactly. My desktop at work is maintained by me. I think that the current RH9 scheme (which is what I run) is fine for what I need. I get the stability I need to get work done along with relatively cutting edge software to run. I pay RH my $60 a year for RHN and upgrade my box every 12 months and I am all set. If I feel like more recent versions of some packages I can go to freshrpms.

People running Oracle in a big company or running 200 workstations can buy RH Enterprise and only upgrade their machines for errata for 5 years.

You need the following RPMs installed for up2date to work:
python
gnome-python2-gtkhtml2
gnome-pytho n2-canvas
gnome-python2
gnome-python2-bonobo
py thon-optik
rpm-python
libxml2-python

I've you been playing around with --force or --nodeps you might have several conflicting python versions installed. Do a "rpm -qa|grep python", remove the python packages with for example "rpm -e python-2.2.2-26". The version number is given as to remove conflicting packages with the same name. Then install the RPMs mentioned above.

Or you could just get apt4rpm. Using this tool you can do

apt-get update
apt-get remove python
apt-get remove up2date
apt-get install up2date

and you system should be back to normal. Python is reinstalled along with up2date in that last step.

Actually, everybody has apt these days. I tried it for RH 8 and 9, and it works great.

If you are using Redhat and love KDE, I would highly suggest checking out the KDE-Redhat project on SourceForge. Rex and his group have done an excellent job of building & optimizing the KDE packages for Redhat versions and, if you are using apt-rpm, it's fairly easy to keep up-to-date with their builds.

Cheers!

Darryl

I want to get my list of updates, select all, click one thing to get them installed, then walk away for a few minutes.

Try apt for RedHat from FreshRPMs. It is a completely painless install for apt. From then on just do:
# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade

Come back in about 2 min if you are on broadband and your system will be up-to-date. If you want a GUI, just do:
# apt-get install synaptic
to get the great Synaptic GUI.

Since installing apt/synaptic 6 months ago, I have yet to manually (or using any other manager) install any RPMs on my RedHat 8.0 machine.

Plus, with Synaptic, when you do the dist-upgrade it shows you what packages will be installed. If there are any that you don't want to upgrade, you can easily deselect them. It seems pretty perfect to me.

While thinking about it, I just did an upgrade and updated 48 packages (out of 1662 currently availible). Quite easy.

at the very least i hope they will get rid of the "rpm hell" that people go thru when you go to upgrade major components.

Ahhh, RPM hell, how I've missed you since I switched to...

...RedHat? Apt-get and its Synaptic GUI both run on RedHat and Matthias Saou of FreshRPMs maintains a giant archive of currently 1655 packages specifically for RedHat.

Since I went back to RedHat last November after years with Mandrake and Libranet, I have yet to install an RPM. Every week I just do an
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
and get all of the patches for security holes posted here on /.

RedHat should really toss some coin or at least help at FreshRPMs as they make RedHat the perfect compromise for people like me who love Linux (haven't used any Microshaft product in 9 months, with the exception of using Windows to play BF1942 for 3 hours/week), but "just want it work". My flat-mate is a complete Gentoo fan and seems to actually enjoy tweeking his kernel every week or so. Well, actually, he has to keep tweeking his kernal because there always seems to be a problem with USB or Raid or some other problem. So what does he do? He comes over to my RedHat box to download photos from his camera. For me at least (a medium-grade Linux user -- I write a lot of bash scripts...) the RedHat/apt-get combo is the ideal combination of ease-of-use, prettiness, and power.

In addition, I've found that a pretty KDE setup is one of the best ways to generate Linux converts, especially when you show the the 35seconds it takes to install DVD software (Ogle) or upgrade all the software on your system, all through the VERY pretty and simple Synaptic GUI.

Why not try FreshRPMS with RedHat if you want apt-get?

That's the issue I always have with Red Hat; I'm left trying to figure out what the heck "/usr/sbin/update-alternatives" is and where it might come from.

Punch it into rpmfind... it'll tell you what packages provide which files, and vice versa.

Though if you don't want to fuss about doing it by hand, I highly recommend apt-get, which you can grab it from freshrpms.net, and if you want to manage it by GUI, grab synaptic while you're at it.

If your are too lazy to compile, and to cheap to subscribe, you can always wait for a couple of days until the merry men at FreshRPMS build the RPM for you.

I've been running RedHat 9 (ISO's downloaded via BitTorrent) all week on my desktop machine (10:32:32 up 4 days, 19:58, 21 users, load average: 0.66, 0.44, 0.86) and it seems fine, the first thing I did was install apt-get to make updates nice and easy, the next thing I discovered was that there is no WindowMaker, which is a real shame, the reason stated by RH is "developer resource constraints". I hope they put it back in, anyhow, this is how I get it working with RH 8 SRPMS:

1. Install the WindowMaker SRPM from RedHat 8.0 updates.
rpm -ivh WindowMaker-0.80.1-5.src.rpm

2. Edit the SPEC file:
vi /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/WindowMaker.spec
Change this:
%define autoconf_ver -2.53
to:
%define autoconf_ver -2.57
Change this:
autoheader%{autoconf_ver}
to:
autoheader
Change this:
autoconf%{autoconf_ver}
to:
autoconf
(I don't know what the implications of this is -- I just played with the SPEC file till it worked...)

3. Rebuild:
rpm-build -bb /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/WindowMaker.spec

4. Install:
rpm -ivh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/WindowMaker-0.80.1-5.i38 6.rpm \
WindowMaker-libs-0.80.1-5.i386.rpm

I also got wmapm, wmclock and wmix SRPMS from RedHat 8.0 and rebuilt those.

There has been some discussion on the wm-user list about doing some RPMS for RedHat 9.

One thing that is great is the inclusion of Subversion -- I installed subversion from scratch on RH 8 and it took some time...

The answers to almost all of those questions comes down to one single point, one that I'm sure that the Red Hat folks are tired of repeating: they are committed to a policy of pure open source/free software in the distro, period, and they won't include anything that will make them subject to patent licensing or the DMCA. That means they won't ship MP3, proprietary NVidia drivers, or DVD playback, or Microsoft fonts. However, you can get these all from the net if you want them. If your Nvidia driver crashes the kernel, then complaining to Red Hat is complaining to the wrong party: Red Hat can only see their source, NVidia can see all of the source.

Since the OSNews people have been around enough to already know these answers, since we had this same discussion when Red Hat 8 came out, it is rude and pointless of them to repeat the same questions. Are they hoping that, one day, Red Hat will wake up and say, "OK, we agree: open source was a stupid idea. We've negotiated licenses from all these folks, and now Red Hat X is a proprietary distro, but it plays MP3s and DVDs out of the box, and we support NVidia drivers. We've tweaked every pixel to match Eugenia's suggestions, too. But no more free ISO downloads, it costs $150, and there's a per-CPU license"?

And yes, I'm aware that some non-US-based distros made different decisions on some of these matters. Note, though, that not being based in the US, they don't need to worry as much about liability from bogus software patents. In the meantime, Red Hat users can install apt, then install MP3 and DVD playback support with a single line. Read all about it.

That is odd since RH doesn't ship with mplayer and it needs to be installed seperatly ;)

I use the apt-get for Red Hat from Freshrpm.net which when you apt-get mplayer it will install all the decss and navdvd...which would give you DVD playback and is required to install mplayer

also that server seems to be maxed out right now for some reason ;)

It's a known bug in XFree86 4.3 when using DVI. Switch to your monitor's VGA port, install nVidia's current drivers, switch back to DVI. Or do a textmode install. I'm using RH9 with nVidia's drivers on my ViewSonic VG191b w/DVI now.

It is likely that other distributions using XFree 4.3 will have the same problem. I didn't have this problem with Red Hat 8 (XFree 4.2).

Be sure to pick up the "missing" RPMs on freshrpms.net when you're done.

I do wish nVidia would update their platform drivers. I had to build the nvnet driver for my nForce2 board the hard way rather than use their RPM. I'm using ALSA (thanks freshrpms!) for audio.

RPM is just the base installer. Redhat's up2date does exactly what you want.

For sites that don't need or want to use RHN then by far the best system to use is the redhat rpm port of apt-get available on freshrpms.net (not sure where its real home is).

We've been using for almost 2 years now and it really is awesome.

Here's a forward of an email I've sent earlier, which should please some Red Hat Linux desktop users. The sylpheed packages have been updated (the problem worked around), and the ALSA kernel modules are on their way!

Matthias

From: Matthias Saou
To: RPM-List
Subject: Red Hat Linux 9 freshrpms packages
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 16:11:33 +0200

Hi all,

Red Hat Linux 9 is here, and so are the new freshrpms.net packages!
Of course, as the main distribution is only currenty available to RHN
subscribers, the "os" and "updates" apt/yum modules aren't avaible yet, and
won't be until the release actually hits the stores and public ftp servers,
which should happen one week from now.
The new website is:
http://shrike.freshrpms.net/
All relevant parts of freshrpms.net and apt.freshrpms.net have been (or are soon going to be) updated to reflect the change.

New stuff: (*IMPORTANT*)
- The apt server is now http://ayo.freshrpms.net/ and the paths no longer
include "en". For the info, "ayo" stands for "apt, yum and others" ;-)
- All files are also available through yum, although no yum package for
Red Hat Linux 9 is currently available from freshrpms.net (soon!). See
http://www.dulug.duke.edu/yum/ for more.
- Some packages have had their non-relevant epoch value removed. These
may be problematic if you decide to upgrade your system instead of
performing a complete reinstall. The affected packages are:
- apg
- anjuta
- blackbox (but was 0 anyway)
- gentoo
- gkrellm
- gkrellm-plugins
- gkrellm-themes
- gtktalog
- i8kutils
- libdvdcss
- ltris
- proftpd
- subtitleripper
- xine
The only packages with epoch set are the ones that need it in order to
keep upgradability with older Red Hat packages.
- The ALSA kernel modules don't work with the default Red Hat 9 kernel, so
until a solution is available, no ALSA :-(
- The mjpegtools won't recompile, so transcode is currently built without
mjpeg support (required for (S)VCD IIRC).
- The sylpheed and sylpheed-claws packages don't seem to recompile with SSL
and produce include errors (krb5 from openssl) that I also have on
YellowDog Linux 3.0, I'll dig into that. For now, the 8.0 binary
packages should work fine.
- A few packages now compile again in their latest version, most notably
the screem web editor and the totem xine/gtk2 player.
For the impatient ones, remember that signing up with RHN will allow you to
support Red Hat, which is still providing us with a great (my favorite ;-))
GNU/Linux distribution! For the others, only one week left to go... and...
have you considered subscribing to RHN? :-)

That's all for now, please report back to me any eventual problems, but
most of all... have fun!
Matthias

Here's a forward of an email I've sent earlier, which should please some Red Hat Linux desktop users. The sylpheed packages have been updated (the problem worked around), and the ALSA kernel modules are on their way!

Matthias

From: Matthias Saou
To: RPM-List
Subject: Red Hat Linux 9 freshrpms packages
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 16:11:33 +0200

Hi all,

Red Hat Linux 9 is here, and so are the new freshrpms.net packages!
Of course, as the main distribution is only currenty available to RHN
subscribers, the "os" and "updates" apt/yum modules aren't avaible yet, and
won't be until the release actually hits the stores and public ftp servers,
which should happen one week from now.
The new website is:
http://shrike.freshrpms.net/
All relevant parts of freshrpms.net and apt.freshrpms.net have been (or are soon going to be) updated to reflect the change.

New stuff: (*IMPORTANT*)
- The apt server is now http://ayo.freshrpms.net/ and the paths no longer
include "en". For the info, "ayo" stands for "apt, yum and others" ;-)
- All files are also available through yum, although no yum package for
Red Hat Linux 9 is currently available from freshrpms.net (soon!). See
http://www.dulug.duke.edu/yum/ for more.
- Some packages have had their non-relevant epoch value removed. These
may be problematic if you decide to upgrade your system instead of
performing a complete reinstall. The affected packages are:
- apg
- anjuta
- blackbox (but was 0 anyway)
- gentoo
- gkrellm
- gkrellm-plugins
- gkrellm-themes
- gtktalog
- i8kutils
- libdvdcss
- ltris
- proftpd
- subtitleripper
- xine
The only packages with epoch set are the ones that need it in order to
keep upgradability with older Red Hat packages.
- The ALSA kernel modules don't work with the default Red Hat 9 kernel, so
until a solution is available, no ALSA :-(
- The mjpegtools won't recompile, so transcode is currently built without
mjpeg support (required for (S)VCD IIRC).
- The sylpheed and sylpheed-claws packages don't seem to recompile with SSL
and produce include errors (krb5 from openssl) that I also have on
YellowDog Linux 3.0, I'll dig into that. For now, the 8.0 binary
packages should work fine.
- A few packages now compile again in their latest version, most notably
the screem web editor and the totem xine/gtk2 player.
For the impatient ones, remember that signing up with RHN will allow you to
support Red Hat, which is still providing us with a great (my favorite ;-))
GNU/Linux distribution! For the others, only one week left to go... and...
have you considered subscribing to RHN? :-)

That's all for now, please report back to me any eventual problems, but
most of all... have fun!
Matthias

Here's a forward of an email I've sent earlier, which should please some Red Hat Linux desktop users. The sylpheed packages have been updated (the problem worked around), and the ALSA kernel modules are on their way!

Matthias

From: Matthias Saou
To: RPM-List
Subject: Red Hat Linux 9 freshrpms packages
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 16:11:33 +0200

Hi all,

Red Hat Linux 9 is here, and so are the new freshrpms.net packages!
Of course, as the main distribution is only currenty available to RHN
subscribers, the "os" and "updates" apt/yum modules aren't avaible yet, and
won't be until the release actually hits the stores and public ftp servers,
which should happen one week from now.
The new website is:
http://shrike.freshrpms.net/
All relevant parts of freshrpms.net and apt.freshrpms.net have been (or are soon going to be) updated to reflect the change.

New stuff: (*IMPORTANT*)
- The apt server is now http://ayo.freshrpms.net/ and the paths no longer
include "en". For the info, "ayo" stands for "apt, yum and others" ;-)
- All files are also available through yum, although no yum package for
Red Hat Linux 9 is currently available from freshrpms.net (soon!). See
http://www.dulug.duke.edu/yum/ for more.
- Some packages have had their non-relevant epoch value removed. These
may be problematic if you decide to upgrade your system instead of
performing a complete reinstall. The affected packages are:
- apg
- anjuta
- blackbox (but was 0 anyway)
- gentoo
- gkrellm
- gkrellm-plugins
- gkrellm-themes
- gtktalog
- i8kutils
- libdvdcss
- ltris
- proftpd
- subtitleripper
- xine
The only packages with epoch set are the ones that need it in order to
keep upgradability with older Red Hat packages.
- The ALSA kernel modules don't work with the default Red Hat 9 kernel, so
until a solution is available, no ALSA :-(
- The mjpegtools won't recompile, so transcode is currently built without
mjpeg support (required for (S)VCD IIRC).
- The sylpheed and sylpheed-claws packages don't seem to recompile with SSL
and produce include errors (krb5 from openssl) that I also have on
YellowDog Linux 3.0, I'll dig into that. For now, the 8.0 binary
packages should work fine.
- A few packages now compile again in their latest version, most notably
the screem web editor and the totem xine/gtk2 player.
For the impatient ones, remember that signing up with RHN will allow you to
support Red Hat, which is still providing us with a great (my favorite ;-))
GNU/Linux distribution! For the others, only one week left to go... and...
have you considered subscribing to RHN? :-)

That's all for now, please report back to me any eventual problems, but
most of all... have fun!
Matthias

Here's a forward of an email I've sent earlier, which should please some Red Hat Linux desktop users. The sylpheed packages have been updated (the problem worked around), and the ALSA kernel modules are on their way!

Matthias

From: Matthias Saou
To: RPM-List
Subject: Red Hat Linux 9 freshrpms packages
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 16:11:33 +0200

Hi all,

Red Hat Linux 9 is here, and so are the new freshrpms.net packages!
Of course, as the main distribution is only currenty available to RHN
subscribers, the "os" and "updates" apt/yum modules aren't avaible yet, and
won't be until the release actually hits the stores and public ftp servers,
which should happen one week from now.
The new website is:
http://shrike.freshrpms.net/
All relevant parts of freshrpms.net and apt.freshrpms.net have been (or are soon going to be) updated to reflect the change.

New stuff: (*IMPORTANT*)
- The apt server is now http://ayo.freshrpms.net/ and the paths no longer
include "en". For the info, "ayo" stands for "apt, yum and others" ;-)
- All files are also available through yum, although no yum package for
Red Hat Linux 9 is currently available from freshrpms.net (soon!). See
http://www.dulug.duke.edu/yum/ for more.
- Some packages have had their non-relevant epoch value removed. These
may be problematic if you decide to upgrade your system instead of
performing a complete reinstall. The affected packages are:
- apg
- anjuta
- blackbox (but was 0 anyway)
- gentoo
- gkrellm
- gkrellm-plugins
- gkrellm-themes
- gtktalog
- i8kutils
- libdvdcss
- ltris
- proftpd
- subtitleripper
- xine
The only packages with epoch set are the ones that need it in order to
keep upgradability with older Red Hat packages.
- The ALSA kernel modules don't work with the default Red Hat 9 kernel, so
until a solution is available, no ALSA :-(
- The mjpegtools won't recompile, so transcode is currently built without
mjpeg support (required for (S)VCD IIRC).
- The sylpheed and sylpheed-claws packages don't seem to recompile with SSL
and produce include errors (krb5 from openssl) that I also have on
YellowDog Linux 3.0, I'll dig into that. For now, the 8.0 binary
packages should work fine.
- A few packages now compile again in their latest version, most notably
the screem web editor and the totem xine/gtk2 player.
For the impatient ones, remember that signing up with RHN will allow you to
support Red Hat, which is still providing us with a great (my favorite ;-))
GNU/Linux distribution! For the others, only one week left to go... and...
have you considered subscribing to RHN? :-)

That's all for now, please report back to me any eventual problems, but
most of all... have fun!
Matthias

i used their instructions here:

Creating your own apt repository server

these are not the most comprehensive instructions, but after reading this page and looking at their scripts i was able to get it working.

this gives me access to redhat's os, updates and freshrpm's rpms like the xmms stuff. it works really well. i'm using it to manage about 15 computers running redhat 7.2, 7.3 and 8.0.

with some mucking around, you should be able to make other packages work with it.

Use the rpm port of apt, eg see freshrpms.net who have a large apt repository of rpms. Course this wont help you get rpm updates for EOL RH releases, however, apt-get dist-upgrade is about the least painful way to upgrade a box. (still painful though).

Use the rpm port of apt, eg see freshrpms.net who have a large apt repository of rpms. Course this wont help you get rpm updates for EOL RH releases, however, apt-get dist-upgrade is about the least painful way to upgrade a box. (still painful though).

I agree that this is a good way to go -- using a update tool that can use mirrors, it's what YellowDog does, for the new version they have apt and yum.

Personally I use apt with RedHat and YellowDog, but I might try yum some time.

One of the best reasons for a distrubted, free, updates system is that it aviods the potential problems of people not updating.

In the medium term using P2P for ISO's and updates might make most sense, though I also think it's cool that people do want to pay for Linux :-)

Great timing, i *just* switched over my kde to kde3.1 via apt-get. I'm not really sure how I feel about redhat's odd way of grabbing their revenue stream. I do like the fact that they have a slew of people paid working on the code but the up2date thing makes me really unhappy. I'm very close to making a redhat wrapper (in the same way that mandrake was a redhat wrapper at some point) that is basically redhat/rpm compatibility based but w/out some of the annoying revenue stream add-ons. The obvious one is that is officially moving redhat over to apt Right now there are only a few redhat apt-mirrors, but I would be more than willing to host a mirror and it will easily allow us and anyone else to keep the security updates at least "up2date" w/out paying per year per node. The other thing to look at is synaptic which is also a really nice gui for apt as well and puts what i've always liked about debian on the redhat platform.

Also redhat doesn't seem to be doing very well w/ kde. I am not sure whether it is because kde3.0 was really buggy or something happened w/ the 7.3->8.0 transition but I wouldn't mind a redhat that was "un-unified." At the very least, a kde/konqueror that was usable then, since many people think the unified thing is a good thing :)

Anyway maybe talking to a few people and seeing if it would be possible to collect a cd of non-gpl but "open" developer software (Kylix 3, intel compilers 6.0 (kind of a weird license)) would also be nice addons.

At the very least I think defaulting/forking redhat to include apt ,synaptic and having a slew of decent apt-mirror sites would be an obvious and simple fix
the security updating issue w/ the current incarnation of redhat. Its also I think obvious that redhat will never release the up2date server source and have obvious reasons for not incorporating apt into the offical distribution so it may require the redhat' wrapper trick to get apt in there.

In any case, i'm curious as to what you guys think, one the one hand i think its a bit "assholish" as it deprives them of one of their obvious revenue streams, on the other hand I think for those of us who run clusters or whatnot or even want to auto-redistribute custom software onto our own nodes having access to the equivalent of our own up2date software (which apt is a better version of to be honest) is a reasonable task, and furthermore wrapping around redhat (like mandrake did) is somewhat what open source is all about as well, especially as redhat and redhat-compatible rpms/source(i.e. ati/nvidia/vmware drivers) is a bit ubiquitous.

-bloosqr

Great timing, i *just* switched over my kde to kde3.1 via apt-get. I'm not really sure how I feel about redhat's odd way of grabbing their revenue stream. I do like the fact that they have a slew of people paid working on the code but the up2date thing makes me really unhappy. I'm very close to making a redhat wrapper (in the same way that mandrake was a redhat wrapper at some point) that is basically redhat/rpm compatibility based but w/out some of the annoying revenue stream add-ons. The obvious one is that is officially moving redhat over to apt Right now there are only a few redhat apt-mirrors, but I would be more than willing to host a mirror and it will easily allow us and anyone else to keep the security updates at least "up2date" w/out paying per year per node. The other thing to look at is synaptic which is also a really nice gui for apt as well and puts what i've always liked about debian on the redhat platform.

Also redhat doesn't seem to be doing very well w/ kde. I am not sure whether it is because kde3.0 was really buggy or something happened w/ the 7.3->8.0 transition but I wouldn't mind a redhat that was "un-unified." At the very least, a kde/konqueror that was usable then, since many people think the unified thing is a good thing :)

Anyway maybe talking to a few people and seeing if it would be possible to collect a cd of non-gpl but "open" developer software (Kylix 3, intel compilers 6.0 (kind of a weird license)) would also be nice addons.

At the very least I think defaulting/forking redhat to include apt ,synaptic and having a slew of decent apt-mirror sites would be an obvious and simple fix
the security updating issue w/ the current incarnation of redhat. Its also I think obvious that redhat will never release the up2date server source and have obvious reasons for not incorporating apt into the offical distribution so it may require the redhat' wrapper trick to get apt in there.

In any case, i'm curious as to what you guys think, one the one hand i think its a bit "assholish" as it deprives them of one of their obvious revenue streams, on the other hand I think for those of us who run clusters or whatnot or even want to auto-redistribute custom software onto our own nodes having access to the equivalent of our own up2date software (which apt is a better version of to be honest) is a reasonable task, and furthermore wrapping around redhat (like mandrake did) is somewhat what open source is all about as well, especially as redhat and redhat-compatible rpms/source(i.e. ati/nvidia/vmware drivers) is a bit ubiquitous.

-bloosqr

Nope, and we probably won't see anything official from Red Hat in this case. I'm sure that projects like Fedora and FreshRPMs will provide everything necessary, just as they have for 8.0.
Hint:
# apt-get install xmms-mp3

You can get PortSentry and Logcheck from the Debian unstable mirrors.

If you're on Red Hat, SuSE, etc, then you can use alien to convert the debs to rpm (make sure that you have the Alien::Package::* perl modules installed). You can also grab the Red Hat 7.3 PortSentry package from freshrpms.net if that's all you need.

-B

I use apt-get with Redhat. It is easy and free.

And as I understand it, won't one of those commands update me to the latest distribution of RH not just fixing the software I have, but replacing a bunch of things that don't necessarily have problems? That means new things break, people come asking "How do I do this now? It used to work." etc.

No. Using apt to do an update will never upgrade to a new version of RedHat. Your apt sources.list specifies which version you want. And, you just have to choose a repository that updates the way you like. If you used Freshrpms you might get upgrades more often than you want but mostly on non-essential (e.g. xine, mplayer, gkrellm, armagetron) packages. There are other repositories.

In my (parent) post I said:
P.S. To the Debian users who cry "apt-get, apt-get!" I use Apt for RPM, and that kicks ass too...

But I still hear:
I do not have any problems with the RPM system itself, but why has Red Hat still no system implemented like Debian apt ?

Go to http://apt.freshrpms.net and download apt for RPM. Works very nicely. Even though it is not supplied by RedHat directly, it works as though it was. Plus all the security/bug updates can be 'apt-get upgrade'-ed, and there are custom packages also that RedHat do not offer, which also work flawlessly in most cases.

Without touching off a flame war, I will have to disagree with:

Redhat has nothing that can touch urpmi.

There is a version of apt for RedHat-- Here's how to install and use it in RH 8:

Download and install these:

http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/psyche/apt/ apt-0.5.4cnc9-fr1.i386.rpm
http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/psyche/apt/ apt-devel-0.5.4cnc9-fr1.i386.rpm

Make sure you're online, then, as root (or sudo)issue the following commands:

apt-get update

(You will see apt download package listings)

apt-get -f install

(This is to fix dependencies that will prevent apt from working.)

Your output should look something like this:

Reading Package Lists... Done
Collecting File Provides... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 removed and 0 not upgraded.

If your output is different, make sure that you know what you are doing before you let apt make changes to your system.

Now, do:

apt-get install synaptic

and run synaptic as root or sudo root. You now have a gui tool to resolve dependencies and install packages.

This was shamelessly stolen from an excellent article by Robert C. Dowdy on OSNews:

http://www.osnews.com/printer.php?news_id=1890

Without touching off a flame war, I will have to disagree with:

Redhat has nothing that can touch urpmi.

There is a version of apt for RedHat-- Here's how to install and use it in RH 8:

Download and install these:

http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/psyche/apt/ apt-0.5.4cnc9-fr1.i386.rpm
http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/psyche/apt/ apt-devel-0.5.4cnc9-fr1.i386.rpm

Make sure you're online, then, as root (or sudo)issue the following commands:

apt-get update

(You will see apt download package listings)

apt-get -f install

(This is to fix dependencies that will prevent apt from working.)

Your output should look something like this:

Reading Package Lists... Done
Collecting File Provides... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 removed and 0 not upgraded.

If your output is different, make sure that you know what you are doing before you let apt make changes to your system.

Now, do:

apt-get install synaptic

and run synaptic as root or sudo root. You now have a gui tool to resolve dependencies and install packages.

This was shamelessly stolen from an excellent article by Robert C. Dowdy on OSNews:

http://www.osnews.com/printer.php?news_id=1890

Debian can indeed be very political. I still don't understand their problem with the GNOME/Bitstream font licensing agreement, for one.

It's quite sad, really, watching innovation dies within Debian to be replaced by excessive political correctness. Debian used to lead in packaging (apt+deb) but now apt has been ported to RPM (see Conectiva and FreshRPMS), Mandrake has uRPMi, and the Fink project has co-opted apt/deb for binary distribution but added their parallel build-from-source-with-dependency system.

I have packaged quite a few RPMs in the past, mostly due to the lack of compatible RPMs after RH8 came out - but the horrible mess that is debian build scripts put me off. There are even some alternative packaging scripts for Debian, surely a sign of problems, but they never really take off.

Here's my wishlist as an ex-Debian, soon-to-be Fink user (for the second time, my first OS X experience was held back by the lack of vector instructions in G3):
- Peace among developers
- Debian Desktop to succeed in making Debian more customer-friendly
- Faster release cycles (I thought their new testing system was meant to do that)
- Compile from source a'la Fink

Peace,

You just have to install apt4rpm on the Red Hat machine.

Personally I use apt-get (RPM version) and point my sources.list to here (Don't tell them I just anounced it on /.)

Yeah I was wondering about that the other day (people other than RH supporting 6.2) and since I've been using FreshRPMS apt to update Redhat boxes for a few months I asked this question on the FreshRPMS list:

> There are still a _lot_ of people running 6.2 on production machines --
> has anyone considered what role, if any, freshrpms.net could play after
> the 31 March in terms of potentially continuning support for 6.2 via
> security patches?

If anyone can "consider" things for freshrpms.net, I guess it'll be me ;-) I've thought about this indeed... but for me, it's 7.0 that is more problematic, as I still have about 30 or 40 servers running it, and only one (installed a month ago with a proprietary IVR software that was _only_ supported on 6.2, argh!) 6.2 left.

One of the first things I'll try is experimenting with dist-upgrade from 7.0 to 7.3... but as it's quite a major step (despite they're both 7.x, kernel, glibc and bootloader are different!), I fear the results, especially since most of my servers are in various countries and physically unaccessible... :-(

I'll see...
Matthias

For machines that are remote upgrading via a CD is a real problem, I wish debian's installer wasn't so off putting...

Yeah I was wondering about that the other day (people other than RH supporting 6.2) and since I've been using FreshRPMS apt to update Redhat boxes for a few months I asked this question on the FreshRPMS list:

> There are still a _lot_ of people running 6.2 on production machines --
> has anyone considered what role, if any, freshrpms.net could play after
> the 31 March in terms of potentially continuning support for 6.2 via
> security patches?

If anyone can "consider" things for freshrpms.net, I guess it'll be me ;-) I've thought about this indeed... but for me, it's 7.0 that is more problematic, as I still have about 30 or 40 servers running it, and only one (installed a month ago with a proprietary IVR software that was _only_ supported on 6.2, argh!) 6.2 left.

One of the first things I'll try is experimenting with dist-upgrade from 7.0 to 7.3... but as it's quite a major step (despite they're both 7.x, kernel, glibc and bootloader are different!), I fear the results, especially since most of my servers are in various countries and physically unaccessible... :-(

I'll see...
Matthias

For machines that are remote upgrading via a CD is a real problem, I wish debian's installer wasn't so off putting...

I've been using apt-rpm from Fresh RPMS for a while now, which doesn't have these problems. Apt-rpm provides a free solution, with an open back end (so that you can publish your own packages - for example gstreamer use apt-rpm in this way) and works really well. The alternatives, up2date and red-carpet, have closed back ends, you have to get redhat or ximian to publish your package for you.

Perhap we should go to Red Hat Bugzilla and raise enhancment requests for then to support this?

Could you please do a favour to the community and pack the system into an RPM and make it available on the net? I just hate having to compile stuff and taking care of the depencies myself.

Xine RPMs are available from http://freshrpms.net/ with DVD menu support and all compiled in.

As for WMP for Linux, a year ago it would have been interesting. These days all relevant players do DivX 3-5, Quicktime (_including_ Sorenson codec), DVD playing etc. MPlayer is quite possibly the most advanced player ever, with more post processing and general purpose filters and features than you could possibly need. All WMP has is name recognition.