Installing RealPlayer on FC+FE devel x86_64

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Hi,

I've just spent some hours in deep hell trying to install RealPlayer on
a Fedora Devel x86_64 box. It was a long time I haven't been in such
trouble and I must say I do very well without it. So I thought it would
be interesting to share what I found there :

- the rpm on https://player.helixcommunity.org/ is deeply f*-up as
usual, thanksfuly Rex Dieter provides a semi-sane nosrc.rpm on
KDE-Redhat. You just need to adapt it a "little" to the latest Helix
binary dump (see later)

- usual version changes
- make %setup create the root build dir
- patch the realplay script so it actually sets HELIX_LIBS
- remove some stuff installed but not packaged

- rpm didn't want to build an i586 rpm on x86_64 -> make the build arch
noarch, redefine _libdir and _lib to something sane (not lib64). This is
FUGLY but I didn't find any other way to coax rpm into building.

- now you've build a package that can be installed. It "just" needs a
bunch of *i386* packages in FE and livna. (one step the Helix package
"forgets" as it's not checking dependencies)

- This is where I spent most of the time, trying to figure out why yum
didn't want to pull them. Why but WHY don't livna and FE provide
arch-specific mirrorlists. And WHY can't yum look up in x86_64 AND i386
when presented a generic mirrorlist. (deep anguish, wanted to murder
someone when I realised that's why everything was failing). Yum ONLY
searches in x86_64 when you use the default mirrorlists, you have to
create separate livna and FE entries without any mirrorlist and only the
i386 baseurl to make it work. This of course sucks for the root server,
but at this point I was past caring about being nice.

Anyway, now everything works there, I'll be stressing a bit FE & Livna
i386 root servers from now on, but that's real life for you. Hope this
message helps others.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

[seth vidal]

>  - This is where I spent most of the time, trying to figure out why
> yum
>  didn't want to pull them. Why but WHY don't livna and FE provide
>  arch-specific mirrorlists. And WHY can't yum look up in x86_64 AND i386
>  when presented a generic mirrorlist. (deep anguish, wanted to murder
>  someone when I realised that's why everything was failing). Yum ONLY
>  searches in x86_64 when you use the default mirrorlists, you have to
>  create separate livna and FE entries without any mirrorlist and only the
>  i386 baseurl to make it work. This of course sucks for the root server,
>  but at this point I was past caring about being nice.
>   
So you really think it's a good idea for yum to automatically add
repositories for i386 if you're on an x86_64? People complain about
their being too many i386 binaries in the x86_64 tree as is - and you
think having yum default to adding more is going to be helpful?

and the reason why using the mirrorlists fail is b/c the mirrorlists use
the $ARCH variable which expands out to whatever your arch is on the
local system.

-sv

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le samedi 29 octobre 2005 à 09:55 -0400, seth vidal a écrit :
>  > - This is where I spent most of the time, trying to figure out
> why yum
>  > didn't want to pull them. Why but WHY don't livna and FE provide
>  > arch-specific mirrorlists. And WHY can't yum look up in x86_64 AND i386
>  > when presented a generic mirrorlist. (deep anguish, wanted to murder
>  > someone when I realised that's why everything was failing). Yum ONLY
>  > searches in x86_64 when you use the default mirrorlists, you have to
>  > create separate livna and FE entries without any mirrorlist and only the
>  > i386 baseurl to make it work. This of course sucks for the root server,
>  > but at this point I was past caring about being nice.
>  > 
>  
>  So you really think it's a good idea for yum to automatically add
>  repositories for i386 if you're on an x86_64? People complain about
>  their being too many i386 binaries in the x86_64 tree as is - and you
>  think having yum default to adding more is going to be helpful? 
Much as I'd love to have a pure 64bit system today it's not possible now
(which BTW is the whole point of multilib). Now if i386 is considered
harmful could we at least have arch-specific mirrorlists ? Or a yum
switch to activate them ? Even i386 firefox deps are not fully provided
by x86_64 rawhide.

>  and the reason why using the mirrorlists fail is b/c the mirrorlists
> use
>  the $ARCH variable which expands out to whatever your arch is on the
>  local system. 
This is what I realised (after much pain). I doubt I'm the only one in
trouble. Just the first to report it.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot