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links on that page seem to not work;

here instead http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/9/nvidia-x11-drv/

Beta NVidia drivers are available for the beta x.org server. There's also the Nouveau drivers, which might be good enough for 2D performance.

The dynebolic livecd bittorrent listed on that page took me 15 minutes to download. I wouldn't go to the trouble of setting up a system to try it (although the cinelerra package is available from MatthiasSaou's FreshRPMS repository)

Set either apt or yum to look freshrpms repository, instructions can be found somewhere at http://freshrpms.net/. Hardly jumping through a hoop, infact it's exactly the same as Ubuntu.

Keep the thing updated, and set auto-updates to do dry-runs and email you what they could do. ... I actually have a nice shell script for that ... ask me and I'll post it online for you.

Yes, please post it or email it ... I've got a dozen or so Debian servers that could benefit from it regardless of the new storage box. Thanks in advance.

I run this from a bash script /etc/cron.daily/apt-update which delays 30-60 minutes and then runs the main script. Note that $RANDOM, and the hash function need bash and won't work in dash/sh. The cron script's code looks like this: sleep $(($RANDOM % 30 + 30))m && /usr/local/sbin/apt-update -m ... I'm not even going to try to put my apt-update script here as a slashdot comment.

This is my first public release of apt-update, released under the GPL. Also note there are other similar solutions, like apticron and cron-apt, both of which are in the Debian stable repository, but both of which seemed more code than is needed (and they are primarily for actually performing the upgrades, which is dangerous).

On RHEL/CentOS, Fedora, and other APT-capable distributions, this script will work fine. There is one snag; the script searches for "security" in the dry-run install ... DAG/Dries/RPMForge, FreshRPMS, CentOS, and ATrpms don't have a specially reserved source for security the way Debian does, so this won't work. Also of note, Axel Thrimm's atrpms package for most Fedora/RHEL derivates includes a script called "check4updates" which was the inspiration for my script. ... it is a bit more basic, but it uses what it can find of up2date, yum, apt, and smart.

http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linu x/testing/4/firefox/

Look for x86_64

Fedora (as the biggest example) *does* exist "merely at the sufferance of a corporate entity". If Red Hat stopped supporting it tomorrow, it would be gone faster than you can say "Red Hat Linux 9.0".

Maybe this can help you: APT-RPM.

And about some RPM including last known name and version about the RPMs it depends on... it always worked that way, the problem was that you had to solve the dependency tree all by yourself -- something you don't have to do anymore if you use APT.

I know about patent problems, but ...

Bu... Bu... But what?
Then you know why you can't play eg. MP3s out of the box.
You also know that it's a piece of cake to get support for MP3, video players and whatever from places like eg. FreshRPMs.

Since I download the distro itself and don't buy it on a CD/DVD, it's no problem for me personally to also download the 3rd party apps and media support I need.

I'm not that fond of the Fedora "GPL or bust" policy, but it's not an obstacle for me.

Put Apt (http://freshrpms.net/apt/) on the computers. Change settings so that the only repositories it reads off are ones on a local file server. Setup a chron job for "apt-get update" (and whatever switch you need to make it not require a user to press "y"). Then, just setup your own repository on the specified fileserver (all you need is a web/ftp server and some time messing around with directories).

Note that users will need to reset/restart any services that are running for their updates to be applied (this is a GOOD thing, as it can run completely in the background).

I run apt-get (for RPM), freshrpms and kde-redhat. This may not answer the question in as nice a way as you wanted, but if you're going to run a RedHat/Fedora box they can be life-savers:

FreshRPMS
KDE for Red Hat Linux

One solution would be to supply the Sorenson codec as a wrapper under Wine. No, don't laugh, Windows-only codecs for XMMS have been handled under Linux like that before. VQF was handled that way, I believe.

Of course, OS X uses a BSD core, so it should be possible to just write a module to work with one of the IBCS kernel plugins to run the code directly. No porting or modifying required, then.

Oh, there are options. The probolem is not a technical one. It may be, as you say, that they just don't want to do it, but that is not because they can't. It would be purely because they have chosen not to.

The best reason I can think of is that Linux users tend to be skeptical of DRM and are generally a lot more clueful than Windows users on the technical front. As a result, flaws are more likely to be found and openly exploited under Linux.

It is not that the benefits themselves need be lower (though that's possibly the case), but rather the risk:benefit ratio is less favourable. The net gain for Apple is that ratio, not the direct profit.

Besides, with Apple's DRM broken repeatedly, there is a question of whether Apple's coders have the skills to maintain what they already have...

A proof of how bad yum really is, is that some people have independently set up Fedora repositories managed by apt-get!

Bullshit.
Freshrpms.net had apt long before yum was even around.

I used Redhat & Fedora for years. I'd always try a new distro, but I'd end up coming back. And I tried a lot of them, including Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo and Suse.

When Fedora.US first launched, and then was subsumed into Redhat, a lot of user submitted files and extras just seemed to disappear.

Dags and Freshrpms were probably the best place to get the stuff RH didn't supply for Fedora, but even though they're interoperable, I wouldn't say either of them are community driven.

Ubuntu is the first distro that's kept me from coming back to Fedora. From ease of use, it's just as good, if not better, than Fedora. It just seems to do so many small things that Fedora wanted to do, but didn't. Ubuntu ships on one CD, has the power of APT (don't get me started on Yum, and I used APT for years on Fedora / RH w/Freshrpms), and Ubuntu has that community feel to it, even if it is a millionaire funding 'em.

Sorry Red Hat, you came close for many years, but in the end, close wasn't good enough.

Ahem, apt-rpm exist. You can use apt for RPMs. You also have yum.

Myself, I have been "apt-get dist-upgrade"ing for a few years now.

Ref: http://freshrpms.net/apt/

How many similar programs exist on Windows or Mac? It updates installed packages and allows new packages to be installed, whilst resolving dependencies...

http://heidelberg.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=919

FC3 is a great system, but it's a Windows world. There is a fair amount I simply can't do because I don't have DirectX, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, or one of many other Windows only (or non-Linux) applications.

There's a lot you can't do simply because Fedora doesn't ship multimedia software which has non-free codecs enabled. You can hit FreshRPMs, add in their repo, and start getting the stuff Red Hat leaves out (because their lawyers told them to).

And I've used quite a few GNOME and KDE package managers on a variety of flavors of Linux.

Not that I want to be obtuse, but package manager are not related to your desktop environment. You may have a Gnome or a KDE frontend to a package manager, but it is not the package manager proper.

For example, if I'm looking for a RedHat 8.0 binary for an MPEG player ( by poring through rpmfind.net looking for a binary that matches my distro and version), and either download an RPM compiled for SuSE (either by accident or out of desperation), my chances are pretty decent of having it tell me that it needs 6 dependencies resolved before I can watch a simple video clip.

(Emphasis mine) You did exactly what you should not do. Finding and retrieving the correct package is the job of your package manager. The problems you experienced are exactly what apt, yum, urpm, emerge, YaST and the other package managers solve.

Judging by what the description of your problem, I can pretty much infer that you actually never used, and/or don't know exactly what is meant by "package manager".

I see you use RedHat 8; AFAIK, this version built-in package manager was up2date, which is of good help to keep your system up-to-date (duh) but pretty crappy as an aid in installing software. Go to Freshrpms.net and download the apt package for RedHat 8. Install it with rpm -ivh apt...i386.rpm (yeah, it suck to use the command line, but newer distro come with a GUI for package management built-in and RH 8.0 is getting old). Once this is done, type apt-get update followed by apt-get install synaptic. From there on, you can launch the Synaptic GUI frontend to apt from somewhere in the menu. Search for the mplayer package and install it. Bingo, you win.

As I said, newer distro come with a decent package manager built-in so you don't have to go through these hoops. Fedora come with yum, but lack a decent GUI for the process. Both Mandrake and SuSE have decent GUI frontend from what I have been told.

And you can make all the apologies you like for it, but it is B-R-O-K-E-N, and it's going to do a lot to stall the adoption of Linux until it's fixed.

The only thing broken right now is your lack of knowledge about what a package manager is and does, and that is fortunately easy to fix. Follow the instructions above (or use a newer disto) and come back with your questions if you have any. I will gladly accept your apologies for your ignorance and name-calling.

Sorry, not a SuSE user here. But I was damn certain that the YaST package installation facility was able to resolve dependency.

For the other :

• In Mandrake, do "urpmi <package name>" or use the package management GUI within the Control Center.
• In older RedHat and current RHEL, use up2date <package>.
• In newer RedHat and Fedora, use YUM : "yum install <package>". Be prepared for a long wait as yum download update header if you do not keep your system up-to-date, which lead me to recommend to ...
• Use third-party apt with RPM-based distro. I like the package from Freshrpms as it just work out-of-the-box. Then, do "apt-get update; apt-get install <package>".
• In Debian, it's apt-get just like above, and you have my sympathy if you don't know about it. For a GUI, try Synaptic (apt-get install synaptic).
• In Gentoo, it's emerge. But you already know that if you use Gentoo.

Keep using yum, or install apt. For security and general updates, stick with up2date, or just use "yum upgrade". There are many many repositories out there with thoushands of applications. Just have to add a line to your yum.conf or apt sources. Here are a few of my favorites:
FreshRPMS
Dag
Livna
Fedora.us

Some repositories play nicer with each other then others, i.e. Livna is maintained to be compatible with the Fedora.us repo. Dag has a huge selection of applications, as does FreshRPMS. You should read each site and see which you think is best for you. Personally, your best and easiest bet is to just use the yum.conf provided by FedoraFAQ.org. You may want to uncomment some additional repositories, but if you leave it how it is, you should be fine. FedoraFAQ.org is also a good site for general Fedora information. If nothing else, go in #fedora on irc, everyone there is usuaully always friendly and willing to help.
Regards,
Steve

Keep using yum, or install apt. For security and general updates, stick with up2date, or just use "yum upgrade". There are many many repositories out there with thoushands of applications. Just have to add a line to your yum.conf or apt sources. Here are a few of my favorites:
FreshRPMS
Dag
Livna
Fedora.us

Some repositories play nicer with each other then others, i.e. Livna is maintained to be compatible with the Fedora.us repo. Dag has a huge selection of applications, as does FreshRPMS. You should read each site and see which you think is best for you. Personally, your best and easiest bet is to just use the yum.conf provided by FedoraFAQ.org. You may want to uncomment some additional repositories, but if you leave it how it is, you should be fine. FedoraFAQ.org is also a good site for general Fedora information. If nothing else, go in #fedora on irc, everyone there is usuaully always friendly and willing to help.
Regards,
Steve

http://freshrpms.net/ that's cool...

Thank you for the link.

Build failure can be caused by the following: (1) the code has problem with the gcc version you use. or (2) library dependencies are not installed. The first could happen if they bumped the version of gcc used. I think programs written in c++ are more prone to this problem. For the second possibility, if you upgraded your existing installation, it may be the case that your old -devel packages were obsoleted by new versions of the library, but the new version -devel is not picked up during installation. If you installed anew, then you definitely should install the -devel packages again. Definitely check your dependencies again.

Also, mp3 hasn't been included in RedHat distro since 8.0 or so. You should check this out instead. Freshrpms is a complement distribution to RedHat that contains everything missing, such as mplayer, mpg321, and audacity.

As a Red Hat user since 5.0, Fedora Core 3 is the first version I feel is good enough for a non-geek Windows user to try.

I'll attest to that.. I'm quite satisfied, the only thing bugging me still is lack of mp3 and dvd playback. But of course you can get xmms-mp3 rpms from http://freshrpms.net/ etc.

About a 8 months ago I had a hard drive fail and decided to install Xandros to replace the RedHat 9 that was on my dead drive. I had been happily using apt-for-rpm thanks to the great guy[s?] at freshrpms.net and had long since grown to love the Debian software management way:
1. $ sudo -s
2. # apt-get update
3. # apt-get upgrade/install xxxx
4. there is no 4, its done everything is up to date, nothing else to do.
The web server that I inherited was running Debian, so I had general idea of where to look for configs and things and thought I'd try Xandros for myself as well as try it out in preparation for setting up for my mother. The mother test is yet to come yet as I've spent most of our brief visits socializing instead of messing with the computer. This will happen soon though since I must say that using Xandros has been far and away the most pleasurable Linux experience that I have ever had.

The good:
- As little battling with hardware as I've ever experienced.
- Auto recognizes CDs, my camera, other USB stuff. Finally plug and play without having to write shell scripts to mount/unmount the CD!
- Unlike the rest of the Distros, Xandros cleaned out the 'start' menu, organized them, and got rid of the dozens of choices for every kind of app. This is probably on of the most confusing things about most distros, you pull up the 'Applications' menu and see 2 office suites (KOffice and OpenOffice), 5 email clients, 10 text editors, and 4 sound players. I'm all for choice, but its overwhelming for first-timers and cluttered for everyone else.
- Everything I love about Debian, in a friendly package.
- A 'fast user-switching' button like OSX and winXP so that you can easily switch between X-Sessions without having to know the ALT+F6/ALT+F7 keys

The not so good:
- Its not the most blazing distro, but does [barely] function with KDE on a Pentium200. I am running Xandros without KDE on my laptop/picture-frame.
- It takes up about gig, but I guess this is pretty standard for distros (with apps included).

The 'not good, but problematic elsewhere' dept:
- have to manually configure things to get all 5 buttons working on my mouse. This IS doable though, and I have made up a step-by-step install guide for beginners wanting to set up Xandros. It includes all the little steps I did to get the mouse, DVDCSS, nVidia drivers, etc going. I wrote this up for a friend, but it might help others beginners too, since these things seem to beyond the scope of most distributed install guides.

All in all, I've found it to be VERY user-friendly compared to everything except OS X. At the same time, its Debian, so when I wanted to set up PostgreSQL, PHP, Perl, and Apache so I could do some work, it didn't get in my way.

Isn't apt-get the apt-get for rpm systems nowadays?

We work with what's supported when it comes to commercial applications. If I'm paying for support on particular distributions, those are what I will use for production systems. If you worked for me, I'd be telling you to forget it unless you were able to get my current support contract modified to support, as fully as the currently supported distributions, whatever you wanted to run, without additional cost.

As a manager, there is no amount of arguing you could do to convince me to use anything but the supported operating systems. The reason is simple: I don't want a vendor to be able to shift the blame for their software breaking to my tech staff and tell us to support it ourselves.

That being said, have you checked out apt-rpm? I've used it in several RedHat shops and I have to say, I really like it.

I went through this same discussion at my company, as Debian is my preferred distro as well. The thing is, beyond the distribution scheme, I really don't get to experience the true differences between the distros, as I'm usually running an unstable release anyways.

The link above also documents creating an apt RPM repository - we did this at my company, and to be honest, 99.9% of my gripes with RedHat went away completely.

I'd suggest looking into apt for RPM, it fixes a lot of the problems, and doesn't introduce those posed by a totally new distro on your production boxes.

I have been using Knoppix off the CD-ROM for a while, while I looked in vain for a popular, non-KDE-needing distribution which can play multimedia files (not RH-9 or Fedora.)

Install Fedora Core 2. Go to: apt.freshrpms.net and copy the yum.conf file over your /etc/yum.conf

su & type 'yum install mplayer', 'yum install xine', 'yum install [myfavouritemultimediaapp]' and it'll resolve all deps and install the whole lot. No fuss, no muss.

Yes, Red Hat have made the decision to keep some software to keep patent-cloudy s/w off their distros, but seeing as adding them is as easy as it possibly could be, there's no excuse to avoid the distros.

I just updated my Fedora day before yesterday using apt-get for rpm and its GUI Synaptic.
Yesterday evening when I reached home it was total suprise for me that my wife (a doctor and with very little knowledge of computers) was not only able to Browse the net but also
send emails and
listen to internet radio from smashhits.com
all by herself without any external help.
It made me realise that Linux Desktop is not as difficult to use for a new user as we think.

But of course!

Go to Freshrpms, and you can get the APT-GET tool (that one's for FC2) and the Synaptic package (also for FC2, both are the downloads), and load the RPMs. It's actually quite nice. Even works when you have cruddy wiring at home, and therefore cannot get Yum to work.

But of course!

Go to Freshrpms, and you can get the APT-GET tool (that one's for FC2) and the Synaptic package (also for FC2, both are the downloads), and load the RPMs. It's actually quite nice. Even works when you have cruddy wiring at home, and therefore cannot get Yum to work.

Try APT for RPM or Yum next time. For RedHat and Fedora distros, FreshRPMS is a good starting point

It's fairly hard for a "normal" User on the slim line between an fairly actual system and a productive system. Anyway, new stuff always attracts me a lot (another load of hours lost :-)...

But the problem on Linux and especially with distributions a la Fedora is interoperability. Every version demands it's own RPM archive, there isn't just this thing like "xine-0.99xx.rpm" and GO. It's just like DLL Hell on Windows with the difference that it's more complicated to have different versions coexisting (M$ did some tweaks in that area); i know, it's cleaner but under M$ "IT JUST WORKS".

What really needs to get done is a wider adoption of sort of freedesktop.org "standards" like DBUS and a defined versioning System for all those *.so libraries on the system. Apple does some fairly cool tricks in that area with so called "frameworks" which exist as isolated directories and can contain multiple versions of a framework. Combined with late binding, it's just possible to trust a certain frozen API version.

I know it was already a huge step forward that most libraries now feature those xxx-config scripts so that the "user" doesn't have to supply all those directories and stuff for easier building. But let's get serious on that: A "real" user doesn't compile his stuff. And without tackling that matter we won't get serious (and working) package dependencies. And till that doesn't work every distribution is in fact a big bloated testing team trying to figure out the dependencies and building propietary packages that only work with this specific version of the distrib...

BTW I think that's part of the reason why gentoo is so successful...

I would need to upgrade the drivers sometime anyway.

If NVidia would allow the drivers to go mainstream, that wouldn't be a problem. You would simply get the new drivers with your distribution's update system.

I also had trouble with other things, like getting Mplayer to work so I could watch DVDs.

I use Fedora Core which does not by default include mplayer (cowards), but I can download it from freshrpms.net, and that works just great. But for watching DVDs I prefer ogle (also from freshrpms.net).

I would need to upgrade the drivers sometime anyway.

If NVidia would allow the drivers to go mainstream, that wouldn't be a problem. You would simply get the new drivers with your distribution's update system.

I also had trouble with other things, like getting Mplayer to work so I could watch DVDs.

I use Fedora Core which does not by default include mplayer (cowards), but I can download it from freshrpms.net, and that works just great. But for watching DVDs I prefer ogle (also from freshrpms.net).

Now installing software on my red hat systems feels like a chore

FreshRPMS provides a quality APT repository for Redhat and Fedora distros. Their FC2 starter RPM isn't available yet, but when it is, you can simply install the RPM and a working apt system is setup configured to use FreshRPMs as the main repository. As was the case with Redhat 9 and Fedora Core 1, FreshRPMs will have quality multimedia packages. Since you want a user-friendly experience, after installing the starter apt RPM, type "apt-get update" and then "apt-get install synaptic". After that you can install, remove, and update software through Synaptic, which is a relatively user-friendly GUI.

Then you can search for codecs, video players, audio players, etc... and install the search results you like by clicking on them and flagging them to be installed. Once you have flagged everything you want... just click the "proceed" button and everything is downloaded, installed, and configured in the proper order.

BAM! You have multimedia. If you were hunting around for weeks, then you aren't a very good hunter.

I know this from experience. About a year ago I dropped Windows, and went 100% Linux on the desktop. I quickly learned about FreshRPMs and soon there after, I had a quality mplayer install for my video needs, and I had all of the mp3, etc... plugins installed for XMMS.

FreshRPMs is a quality free service. You would be a fool to not use FreshRPMs, if you are using Fedora as your desktop. I have used other apt repositories for Fedora, and none of them have the quality and quantity of packages as FreshRPMs has.
Of course, Debian is still the best when it comes to quality and quantity repositories... but we are talking about Fedora here, not Debian :)

I really like it alot, so far no problems. The only thing I don't like about a fedora box is that I have to hunt around for weeks to get the necessary multimedia stuff in it.

I found this info quite by chance after moving from RHN to yum after installing Fedora core. I've posted this before, but here it is again:

Add these lines to your yum.conf (watch out for the slashcode extra spaces in the baseurl line):

[freshrpms]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - freshrpms
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora /linux/$rel easever/$basearch/freshrpms

And for all your patent-encumbered multimedia needs, you just need do:

% yum install mplayer
% yum install xine
% yum install [whatever else you want]

and it'll resolve all dependencies and keep you away from rpm-hell but still within RH's rpm goodness.

NOTE - freshrpms haven't got Feodra Core 2 rpms yet - give them time!

Call me nuts, but playing MP3's these days is about as basic as being able to copy a file from one place to another.

There are better alternatives to MP3. Of course that is not why MP3 support was removed. It was removed because of patents, and that happened already around RH7.3 IIRC. Since then I got MP3 and DVD playing programs from freshrpms. Looks like there are no FC2 packages there yet, but I believe they will come. Until then you could try the FC1 packages.

But what's with the no xfree86?

License changes. What you get instead is AFAIK a fork from just before the license change, so it is really the same software, just a new name.

I got a Linux distro working, the GUI was *slow as hell*.

Probably driver problems. Are you sure you are using the right hardware? I know some of the desktop environments have been bloated. But I think they have started caring about it. It is long time since the last time I felt the GUI had become slower from an update.

It starts here and continues for a bit.

sorry, the May archive. Start of thread is here. It starts off about ClamAV 0.70. Enjoy.

Samba is included, as is the new CIFs driver which replaces smbfs. What isn't included is the NTFS read-only driver module, which you can download as a binary RPM from linux-ntfs. As for the other stuff, I like to use the fedora.us + livna.org* repositories. There is also freshrpms, ATrpms, Dag Wieers, and Planet CCRMA. There are others, and be warned that Dag Wieers and Axel Thim (atrpms) are in a pissing match over Dag obsoleting at least one of Axel's packages for naming it "wrong". (look at the April acrhives of the freshrpms mailing list with some fresh popcorn).

* - The livna.org front page still says they are down and lists the mirror. The rpm.livna.org repo is actually back up, they just never bothered to update the main page to say so.

Well, you should try APT for RedHat/Fedora and you will get the almost perfect apt packaging system.

I really think their quality is improving. FC2 test3 is a nice system, and I think adequately simplified for most home users. It's great that they're almost right on the edge of the major stuff (KDE, kernel, GNOME, X, etc), most distributions seem to lag pretty heavily. In additon, the access to ISOs has been pretty spectacular, not something I could say for RH8, RH9.

--

An RPM build of apt-get for Fedora is available at FreshRPMS. You can also install Synaptic which is a graphical GUI for apt-get.
Its all there for ya.

An RPM build of apt-get for Fedora is available at FreshRPMS. You can also install Synaptic which is a graphical GUI for apt-get.
Its all there for ya.

Still it lacks the amazing 'apt-get' feature that makes me love debian.
apt is available for fedora core and older rh versions

For a Windows install my choices are :

1. ZoneAlarm Basic - Mandatory firewall
2. Windows Update - Mandatory updates
3. Mozilla - Why would you use Internet Explorer any longer?
4. Winrar - This little program is doing its job
5. Winamp
6. Acrobat reader
7. Putty - An efficient ssh client to communicate with your Linux boxes
8. OpenOffice.org - Word processing
9. Microsoft Office - Sometimes OpenOffice.org can't do the job...
10. Adobe PhotoShop

For Linux my choices are :

1. Update your installation - yum, apt or up2date
2. xmms-mp3 - Enable mp3 playback (freshrpms.net)
3. mplayer - The best video player (mpg, avi, dvd) (freshrpms.net)
4. perl-Video-DVDRip - Add a movie collection beside your music collection (freshrpms.net)
5. CodeWeavers CrossOver Plugin - Enable Microsoft plugins in Mozilla
6. Quicktime (via CrossOver Plugin)
7. Windows media player (via CrossOver Plugin)
8. Shockwave player (via CrossOver Plugin)
9. CodeWeavers CrossOver Office - Run Windows application in Linux
10. Microsoft Office (via CrossOver Office)