Yum or APT?

[duragezic]

I installed FC3 fresh a couple of days ago. I've been trying to get software on. Everyone says to use yum so you can avoid those bastard dependency issues and that you should avoid a lot of 3rd-party RPMs in general. Yet, while using the yum.conf from the guy at Unofficial Fedora FAQ, although I get a huge list from doing 'yum list available', I can't find most of what I need. For instance, where would I get licq, Firefox 1.0, eterm, etc from?? I don't see them on the list. yum worked good for things on the Fedora FAQ like the mp3 addon to XMMS, flash plugin, and some others, but most of the software I still have to go find and then put up with dependecies. Also, how do I increase the # of lines shown in xterm? I used something in FC2 called Synaptic which IIRC is a GUI for apt-get. Does anyone use that instead of yum??

On a completely unrelated note, do you guys know if they did something different with java in FC3? Because I downloaded the SDK but it doesn't appear to be installed right because I can never get it registered with Firefox using that system link. When I run a java application like java, appletviewer, javac, etc., it displays a bunch of stuff about gcj and some placeholder stuff?

 

[drag]

I don't know why people said that Yum would avoid dependancy issues vs apt-get.

It's the quality of the repositories were you getting your packages from that determine this. Either they missunderstand the issues or you missunderstood what they said. Either way it's not a big big deal.

With Fedora Core 3 first thing I do is head on down to Dag's RPMs and install his third party package.

see here

Read what he has to say about mixing repositories. He is right. You can use Yum with his stuff, or Apt-get. Doesnt' matter except as matter of preference. Remember it's the repositories that you choose to use that can make or break the dependancy issues. All Apt-get and yum use is a list of aviable packages and the packages list their dependancies. Then they calculate out the dependancies and they both work just as well. They do it different ways, and have different styles.

There is always a danger of mixing repositories, but as long as the maintainers have good communication and offer high quality packages it's not a issue. This is one of the reasons people use Debian. It's a bit stuffy, but the package maintainers do a great job. Especially if your using "testing".

Avoid the using the repositories that Dag talks about, then you'll be fine.. When you install Dag's apt-get it will automaticly setup several other repositories such as Freshrpm and others. They do a decent job of making sure everything works and you get access to official Fedora packages thru Freshmeat so you shouldn't have to mess around with it.

You may have issues with some of the packages you already installed, but it shouldn't be a big deal.


That way you can use Synaptic if you want. If you don't want to risk mixing Dag's stuff into your Fedora install you can simply switch over to apt-get and just use the repositories that your using with Yum. (as long as the ones your using support both Yum and Apt)

 

[WobbleWobble]

I personally use apt-get then Synaptic on my FC3 machine. I'm a newb at this stuff and I was able to get it working easily. But for some reason, apt-get couldn't retrieve Synaptic for me so I had to install that manually.

It was simple, install apt-get, "apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" (I think) then install Synaptic. I get my stuff and instructions from atrpms.net

 

[kamper]

That gcj stuff would be gnu's work on java. I won't badmouth it, since I've never used it, but you wouldn't catch me with anything other than the sun jdk (unless I was just playing around with something different for fun). I have heard of the gnu stuff conflicting with the sun stuff so you might want to uninstall it. Do something like:
yum list installed "*gcj*"
or
yum list installed "*java*"
and see what comes up.

 

[rmrf]

IMO apt is the way to go. I used to be on rpm based distros, and it was a godsend then. Now I am on a debian based distro, ubuntu, and the repository is just wonderful.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: kamper
That gcj stuff would be gnu's work on java. I won't badmouth it, since I've never used it, but you wouldn't catch me with anything other than the sun jdk (unless I was just playing around with something different for fun). I have heard of the gnu stuff conflicting with the sun stuff so you might want to uninstall it. Do something like:
yum list installed "*gcj*"
or
yum list installed "*java*"
and see what comes up.

Yep. GCJ isn't a runtime enviroment, It's a compiler for java to convert it to machine code... I beleive. It's not quite ment to be the same thing.

A free Java VM enviroment is Kaffe. It's not as nice as Sun's or IBM's java implimentation, but it's Free.

To install Sun's stuff I just just go to www.java.com and follow the directions. Uninstall the gcj stuff.

Also IBM has a version, but it's a pain to find and install in comparision to sun's. Since I use Linux PowerPC right now IBM's and kaffe java is the only ones aviable. For IBM on PowerPC I installed the Java for their Linux POWER workstations.

 

[duragezic]

I've followed the directions on Sun's page. It installs without errors but still doesn't seem quite right like when I installed the SDK on my previous FC2 installation. How would I uninstall GCJ? I think I want to stick with Sun's Java 1.42 for now because that's what we use in the CS labs at school.

As far as avoiding dependency issues vs. apt-get, I didn't word my post right. I meant that they are both designed to do the same thing. I was just wondering if anyone found apt-get to be better than the default FC yum, which might be the case, so I think I'll try that out with the repos from that link. RIght now, my yum.conf has the fedora.us and livna basically. Maybe 6 in total. It looks like my yum.conf has Dag's and FreshRPMs, but they are disabled because there is a comment that it may conflict with official fedora.us stuff. Perhaps I'll disable the fedora.us one and enable Dag's, then see if there is some more available RPMs.