Linked by Jeremy LaCroix on Thu 3rd Jun 2004 07:02 UTC
During the majority of my time working with computers, Windows was the operating system of choice. Reason being, it's all I've known. In 2002, I took a college course titled "Linux Administration" which entitled me to a few cd-roms of Redhat 7.x. While this course was nothing more than a few extra credits for me, I fell in love with Linux and went through the entire textbook a week into the class. It was a nice feeling to use something "different" than what I was used to.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
mandrake use rpms and have urpmi that solves this problem nicely. what i do is to create a folder on my system that i put downloaded rpms in that are set up as a local rpm store in urpmi (i just wish they had a drag and dump or similar in rpmdrake for the gui users/newbies out there). then i run a sync on that store and install the package from urpmi. rh/fedora dont have this ability at all i belive (unless you can do it with apt-get that is). in many ways fedora is quite archaic when it comes to package management out of the box in my view.
the perfect solution would be that every rpms came with not jsut a list of dependencys but allso a url for downloading them if they where not installed. and every system would be able to, when you doubleclick a rpm, hand the rpm to say urpmi or apt-get for checing of dependencys against the database and if they where not found as installed or available in a known store then they would fire up wget if you had a working internet connection or promt you to download the rpms listed with urls and install them first. maybe they could even integrate the system with rpmfind so that any unknown rpms would be run tru that database for checking. and there should be a online rpm checksum database so that you could run any rpm up against it to check if its valid, hell it should happen automaticly if you have a working net connection!
these are small and simple changes to rpms that will help the user without creating big monolithic rpms like the author suggested.