Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Re: Help choosing the right Linux Distro

I agree about yum being much improved and on par with apt. The biggest
problem with rpm distros is there is no uniformity. SuSE uses Yast/ Zypper,
Fedora uses Smart and Yum, RedHat uses up2date, Mandriva uses urpmi, but
last I heard they were switching to something else. To confuse things
further PCLOS uses apt-rpm and Synaptic. Whereas all Debian distros use apt
and dpkg. The commands are the same across all Debian based distros. That
makes rpm harder to get to like and learn.

I will add to that my recent experience with F14. I had several package
managers installed, Packagekit, Yumex, Smart and Add /Remove and I could not
get all of them to work from the same database. I would update in Yumex and
then Packagekit would say it could not find the database and update which I
had done just seconds before in Yumex. So I would rebuild the database but
it would still only work in Packagekit and another one would break. At no
point could I get all four to work. Not only that it would update the
package list twice, before I installed an application and afterwards, before
I had a chance to quit Yumex. It seems very touchy and antiquated to my
thinking.

Presto seems like a good idea, but it does not save any time because it
spends much time calculating changes and testing them when it could be
installing. It does save bandwidth if that is important to you. It may sound
like I am being harsh, but I will save that for Yast which I have no use
for. Yast tries to resolve dependencies and presents the user with choices
and if the user is experienced it can be good, but if the user chooses
wrongly it can destabilise the whole system.

The advantage of Debian over RPM used to be stability, but as mentioned RPM
is stable now. The advantage now is that Debian is more uniform and simpler
to use. It also has far more packages because Debian maintains such huge
repos. The best RPM distro in my experience has roughly half the number of
packages that Ubuntu has.

When there is so much talk about having one package manager to rule them
all, it seems that RPM must first get its act together and agree on some
standards before they could hope to present RPM as a viable alternative to
DEB.

Roy

Using Kubuntu 10.10, 64-bit
Location: Canada

On 1 December 2010 06:26, Scott <scottro@nyc.rr.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 01:44:34AM -0500, J wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 01:20, Scott <scottro@nyc.rr.com<scottro%40nyc.rr.com>>
> wrote:
> > > On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 05:47:13AM -0000, dbneeley wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >>
> > > It handles dependencies, gives you ways to work around
> > > them, and has one nice featuer that may or may not be in apt, the
> > > "provides"--for example, if you try to build a package and get
> > > libwhatever.so.5-1/2 not found, you can run
> > >
> > > yum provides */libwhatever.so.5-1/2.
> > >
> > > It will then search its database, and come back whatever packages may
> > > provide this particular library.
> > >
> > For those of us who no longer wear the Red Fedora, there is apt-file like
> so:
> >
> > bladernr@klaatu:~$ apt-file search /lib32/libdrm.so.2
> > ia32-libs: /lib32/libdrm.so.2
> > ia32-libs: /lib32/libdrm.so.2.4.0
> >
> Ah, very handy. Thank you Jeff.
>
> --
> Scott Robbins
> PGP keyID EB3467D6
> ( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6
>
> Buffy: You sound like Mr. Initiative! 'Demons bad,
> people good.'
> Riley: Something wrong with that theorem?
>
>

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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