On Tue, 2007-05-29 at 21:58 +0100, Chris Jones wrote:
> Can I paraphrase your advice as: "Fedora is a system with a
nice
> packaging and update mechanism. Don't use them."?
I guess it is a matter of "each to their own".
For what it is worth though, I agree with you. After many years experience
with linux the one peace of advice I would give people now, when setting up a
system, would be to ONLY install packages from properly maintained and
compatible sources. I have time and again run into problems due to my
installing packages from source, such that now I only do it if a) the package
is ABSOLUTELY essential.
In the case of Fedora this means RPM packages and to get them via yum(or apt,
smart) from one of the various repos available.
To take some the the examples given by Ric,
nvidia : I recommend MOST STRONGLY to not install the official installer. The
reason being is the official installer overwrites the standard GL libraries.
Once you have done this it is practically impossible to go back to the OSS
driver. Luckily both atrpms and livna supply kernel module RPMS for the the
nvidia drivers, that work around this problem.
URRRP! Sorry! I beat my brains out for MONTHS trying to get the heavily
openGL intensive 3D environment Croquet to work. Many MONTHS wasted, of
what should have been devel time, down the crapolla as the problem was
immediately fixed by installing the nVidia driver. Burn me once, but not
twice. Oh hell nah. I go with what works for me.
The one issue people often quote with this is when a new kernel is
released,
you might get that kernel as an update before livna/atrpms has provided the
rpm for your new kernel. Luckily, both sites provide yum plugins to protect
against this (just run 'yum search yum' to find them).
firefox : I currently use the remi repo (
http://remi.collet.free.fr/) which
providesFF2 rpms. Been running these for some time now with ZERO problems.
It took about a year for Remi to offer it after 2.0 was released, too. I
was already running 2.0 for ages and even have the Beta 3.0 installed
now... with ZERO problems.
java.
http://www.jpackage.org/ provides rpms for java.
Bottom line. I am sure that someone can quote some odd esoteric package for
which there is no rpm repo available, but for the main ones most people use,
there are MUCH better and safer alternative than the old 'install from
source' mantra...
Call it a mantra if you wish, I have my reasons. Number One is my sanity. :) Ric