Fedora Core 4 as good as Ubuntu?

[pcthuglife]

lol I was just making the point that Synaptic handles new package installation better than RPM based distros (at least thats my opinion). Anything marked for installation automatically gets its dependencies met with Synaptic. I think its the easist package installation tool available on a linux platform. I don't like wasting time meeting RPM dependencies so I personally wouldn't recommend FC4 over Ubuntu.

 

[Doh!]

Don't forget Yast. It's just as easy or convenient as Synaptic. OpenSuSE is very noob-friendly.

 

[Nothinman]

Synaptic runs on top of the real package manager (i.e. rpm or dpkg) so it's a bad comparison. Comparing Synaptic to yum would make more sense and AFAIK yum handles dependencies just fine as long as they're all available in the configured repositories and yum is installed by default in FC AFAIK.

 

[pcthuglife]

You're right YUM is what I should be comparing to Synaptic rather than just individual rpm installations. I still prefer Ubuntu but if the OP is having problems with it and is comfortable with FC4 then there's no reason why he shouldn't switch back. I do know that when FC4 was first released there were a lot of gripes on some of the Linux boards but I don't remember their specific complaints.

 

[Nothinman]

I definately have no love for FC or yum. The available repositories are really small and the quality questionable compared to Ubuntu or Debian. I like the fact that FC pushes new things out there for people to test and fix like UTF-8 by default and now SELinux is on by default, but I personally cringe whenever I have to use a FC or RH box, I'm constantly saying "This would be so much easier in Debian..." at work =)

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: minofifa
anyways, i'm likin FC4, it is pretty cool. I added synaptic to system but there are no repositories for it. where do i find the uRL's and other info needed to add the FC4 repositories to synaptic? I have apt installed.

http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/ is a decent place to start. As I understand it though, apt and yum repositories are different and the base fedora repositories are not offered for apt, so you'll never get away from yum completely.

 

[Nothinman]

Which is pretty much the main reason why I dislike FC, the main repos have virtually nothing in them so you're forced to look for 3rd party repos if you want a decent number of packages to choose from.

 

[minofifa]

so i can add whatever repository i choose to apt/synaptic and the packages will work fine? in other words, say i use the rpositories found in ubuntu and added them to repository list in synaptic. would there be problems since that repositroy is designed for ubuntu not fedora core?

 

[Nothinman]

Nope, you can't use Ubuntu repos because Ubuntu is based on Debian and used dpkg instead of RPM.

 

[minofifa]

here's a question kindof off topic but...

how is debian compared to ubuntu... is there much of a difference... maybe i could gnopernicus working in debien.. is mandrake similar to debien?

 

[Nothinman]

Debian and Ubuntu are pretty close, Ubuntu has a more streamlined installer and some of the packages are tweaked for better default settings but 90% of the packages are the same. But it's still not a good idea to mix Debian and Ubuntu repos.

And Mandriva is nothing like Debian, it's now a mixture of Mandrake and Connectiva, whatever that means.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: minofifa
so i can add whatever repository i choose to apt/synaptic and the packages will work fine? in other words, say i use the rpositories found in ubuntu and added them to repository list in synaptic. would there be problems since that repositroy is designed for ubuntu not fedora core?

To further Nothinman's advice, this is definitely a no-no. Even using an rpm repository that is not maintained with your distro and version in mind is a bad thing. Even seperate repos targetted at the same distro can be a problem. Repo maintainers need to co-ordinate on package names and install locations and such. If you read the faq on dag's site you'll see a discussion on the problems. Obviously any single repo targetted at a distro will have to respect the conventions of the base repo, but after that, you need to verify that extra repos are in sync. Dag co-ordinates with a couple of other repos and also specifically lists one that you should not mix with his.

 

[minofifa]

ok thanks for the heads up.
it seems like ubuntu has a much larger repository (maintained) than fedora, could be wrong though.

How about gentoo. it has seemed to be the distro of choice for destops. Is it deb or rpm based? how are the repositories for it? thanks again.

Like i said before, i was happy with ubuntu Other than the critical point that i could not get its screen magnifier to work. If gentoo is similar i think i would like to try it.

 

[Nothinman]

it seems like ubuntu has a much larger repository (maintained) than fedora, could be wrong though.

The core repository is probably similar in size, but universe and multiverse are also available. They're rebuilt Debian packages so that they work properly in Ubuntu. AFAIK they're not officially supported but I've never seen anyone complain about them. And since Ubuntu is largely based on Debian I can't see why they wouldn't work just fine. If you enable universe and multiverse that gets you up around 16,000 packages, maybe more since Debian sid is around 17,000 now.

How about gentoo. it has seemed to be the distro of choice for masochists.

Fixed that for you.

 

[minofifa]

gentoo would be a bad choice for me? I was reading their info page and it seems pretty cool how much they try to give the user as much controll as possible. I am still learning the basics of linux though so that distro may be over my head. maybe i shoudl just take klixxer's advice and install slackware? haha he swears by it so maybe he knows something that others are missing.

 

[Nothinman]

I think Gentoo and slackware are both wastes of time. If you take advantage of the power that Gentoo gives you and compile everything from scratch you waste a ton of time, a full stage1 install will take you easily 24hrs if not longer. X.org alone will take around an hr to compile even on a fast machine. And then if you ever change your mind and want to add something to your USE flags you have to recompile half or you distro for it to take affect. And portage is all done in python so it's noticably slower than apt, on a fast machine you might not care though.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: minofifa
maybe i shoudl just take klixxer's advice and install slackware? haha he swears by it so maybe he knows something that others are missing.

Pick any distro any you'll find someone who swears by it. It's actually a useful way to get introduced to new distros, but you can't go in expecting it to be anywhere near is wonderful as they would have you believe

 

[minofifa]

ya, i seem to be trying out more distros than i would have thought. I think the last one on my "to try" list is SuSe. Is it debien based or rpm? How extensive are its repositories, and is it as established as the other well known distros?

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: minofifa
ya, i seem to be trying out more distros than i would have thought. I think the last one on my "to try" list is SuSe. Is it debien based or rpm? How extensive are its repositories, and is it as established as the other well known distros?

I belive Suse is rpm based. I don't know about it's repositories, but it is very well established. In fact, it has the backing of Novell!

 

[pcthuglife]

I really liked SuSE and the Yast control panel. It gave me a GUI for a majority of the system administration tasks I had to perform. I found SuSE to be a little bloated and it seemed to use a lot of resources. I wouldn't run it on anything with less than 512MB or ram and a decent CPU. I'm sure there are ways to turn down the quality settings but I never looked that far into it since the machine I was using it on had a gig of ram.

I just figured I'd throw that out there in case you were thinking about installing it on an old P2 with 64MB of ram

 

[sourceninja]

We have an unlimited license for novell products here. I'd have to say novell is making great strides with linux. I think that in the very near future they could be the biggest commercial linux distro out there.

 

[erwos]

Fedora Core 4 has a few Synaptic-like GUIs that are being developed that act as front-ends to yum (yumex is the one I use). I believe one of them will show up in FC5. I was never particularly impressed with Synaptic, to be honest - it suffered from a major information overload problem, and the GUI was kind of ugly.

I've personally found Debian Unstable breaks itself every so often, which is a rather annoying habit that I've heard Ubuntu carries over if you use the extra universe repos. Ignore the "RPM hell" comments. DEBs have the exact same problems.

-Erwos

 

[Nothinman]

Debian unstable is supposed to break perodically, it's where the active development of the distribution happens. If you don't want to deal with it, run stable or testing. The only time you should dependency issues on Debian is if you're running unstable and there's a major migration happening like was the case recently with XFree86->X.org and the gcc C++ ABI or if you've added some 3rd party repos that have packages of questionable quality.

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: pcthuglife
You're right YUM is what I should be comparing to Synaptic rather than just individual rpm installations. I still prefer Ubuntu but if the OP is having problems with it and is comfortable with FC4 then there's no reason why he shouldn't switch back. I do know that when FC4 was first released there were a lot of gripes on some of the Linux boards but I don't remember their specific complaints.

In FC to get a package installation experience almost identical to that of Synaptice go to terminal as root and type : yum install yumex
which is called the yum extender , simply it's a graphical yum that works the same way synaptic does, but if you want APT and synaptic it's no biggie .

 

[Nothinman]

In FC to get a package installation experience almost identical to that of Synaptice go to terminal as root and type : yum install yumex

That will get you a GTK frontend for yum, it won't get you the amount or quality of the packages available in Debian or Ubuntu and in the longterm that's much more important.