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Adding and Removing Programs in Fedora
So you have your new installation of Fedora up and running and so far you're quite happy with the results. Then you decide that it's time to start installing some new programs. So how do you add in new packages, or remove packages you don't need? |
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Comments (15)
Fedora Core RC3
Yes, I just installed FC3 over Christmas at home, and I am impressed as well. Extremely polished. I bought especially for the purpose a "new-old" computer, 900 MHz Celeron /256MB/20GB (Anybody want a W98 license, little used? :-) and it looks great. This was a great leap from RH6.2.
Pluses: - Very smooth install (in spite of my cheeplinux CD's not passing the media test) - Very mature and complete desktop application set: OOo, Evo, Nautilus, FireFox, ... - Well integrated. E.g., how many people are aware that OOo can be made to use the Evolution address book in order to do mail merge? - There's no end of more or less obscure but amazingly useful-looking applications, if you know how to google for them... most of them on dag. Already the world of LAMP is a universe onto itself (Moodle!). - Great looking!
Minuses: - On my intel815 video acceleration is buggy and must be turned off (xorg.conf). - Getting the sound to work is still the usual battle with device file permissions. I gave up and play sound as root :-( - I had also trouble printing. The gimp-print drivers for my Canon BJC-4300 are buggy (printing at double width) and I had to select the (non-recommended) BJC-600 driver. Ah well. - The "modem lights" applet still doesn't work properly, in much the same way as in RH6.2. I had again to enter my own, very same connect and disconnect scripts: wvdial and killall wvdial.
But all in all, Linux has come an incredibly long way. And today this article gave me the push to add dag to my yum config. I'm having a lot less "extras" rpm's now :-)
- Martin
Pluses: - Very smooth install (in spite of my cheeplinux CD's not passing the media test) - Very mature and complete desktop application set: OOo, Evo, Nautilus, FireFox, ... - Well integrated. E.g., how many people are aware that OOo can be made to use the Evolution address book in order to do mail merge? - There's no end of more or less obscure but amazingly useful-looking applications, if you know how to google for them... most of them on dag. Already the world of LAMP is a universe onto itself (Moodle!). - Great looking!
Minuses: - On my intel815 video acceleration is buggy and must be turned off (xorg.conf). - Getting the sound to work is still the usual battle with device file permissions. I gave up and play sound as root :-( - I had also trouble printing. The gimp-print drivers for my Canon BJC-4300 are buggy (printing at double width) and I had to select the (non-recommended) BJC-600 driver. Ah well. - The "modem lights" applet still doesn't work properly, in much the same way as in RH6.2. I had again to enter my own, very same connect and disconnect scripts: wvdial and killall wvdial.
But all in all, Linux has come an incredibly long way. And today this article gave me the push to add dag to my yum config. I'm having a lot less "extras" rpm's now :-)
- Martin
I am running FC3 and although I intend to stick with it, as FC suits my tastes pretty well, "polished" is not a word that I would choose to describe it. Try plugging in a USB storage device and then unplugging it. Do it a few times. hald will stop recognizing it and a reboot is required to get it working again. (Restarting hald and associated services does not work.) This occurs whether or not you right-click "unount" the device.
Try to install it on a machine with a Dell (LSI) raid controller that is *not* brand spanking new. (Oops. They We left out the driver! Sorry! It is not our policy to reissue iso images. Try FC4-test1 when it comes out. Better luck next time.)
The advansys driver is also missing, but there is at least a valid reason for that.
I've had a linksys card suddenly stop functioning, requiring a reboot. (This card was rock solid stable befor the FC1 -> FC3 upgrade. I also had sshd mysteriously stop listening for connection requests on the same machine.
On another machine, Anaconda "forgot" to update the bootloader. (Oops!)
While I do use FC on servers, it really *can* "EAT YOUR BRANE", depending on your technical expertise, and yes, luck.
Please understand that FC3 is still my favorite distro to date. There are many great things I could say about it. "Powerful in the hands of someone who can work around its brokenness"? Certainly. But "polished"? Not in my experience with it.
Try to install it on a machine with a Dell (LSI) raid controller that is *not* brand spanking new. (Oops. They We left out the driver! Sorry! It is not our policy to reissue iso images. Try FC4-test1 when it comes out. Better luck next time.)
The advansys driver is also missing, but there is at least a valid reason for that.
I've had a linksys card suddenly stop functioning, requiring a reboot. (This card was rock solid stable befor the FC1 -> FC3 upgrade. I also had sshd mysteriously stop listening for connection requests on the same machine.
On another machine, Anaconda "forgot" to update the bootloader. (Oops!)
While I do use FC on servers, it really *can* "EAT YOUR BRANE", depending on your technical expertise, and yes, luck.
Please understand that FC3 is still my favorite distro to date. There are many great things I could say about it. "Powerful in the hands of someone who can work around its brokenness"? Certainly. But "polished"? Not in my experience with it.
Perhaps I should have qualified that by "polished" I meant the look and feel, and behavior, of the desktop *after* any issues have been resolved.
Note that these are mostly luxury issues. A few years ago the i815 issue would have been to get it running at all, accel or not. Of course they are annoying, and for newbies without a google-capable friend, fatal. But given the breadth of what it is trying to support and the sheer number of items on a typical desktop, I will hang on to the word "polished" to describe the feeling it gives me.
And I have been helping to set up a neighbor's Mandrake 10 installation, and trust me, the issues are as many, just different ones :-(
One more annoyance that I found -- but a reported bug that will get fixed -- is that in the default configuration, but with auto-spell check turned on, OOo will try to spell check every word in your document against every language in the known universe. Especially when loading a Finnish document: Finnish spell check isn't yet supported, so *every* word is legally mis-spelled. It loads all the dictionaries (600 MB of them!) and after several minutes of thrashing triggers an "out of memory: killed process" error. It took me several hours to hunt this one down. The workaround is to disable under the "options" menu all languages you're not interested in, i.e., most of them.
- Martin
Note that these are mostly luxury issues. A few years ago the i815 issue would have been to get it running at all, accel or not. Of course they are annoying, and for newbies without a google-capable friend, fatal. But given the breadth of what it is trying to support and the sheer number of items on a typical desktop, I will hang on to the word "polished" to describe the feeling it gives me.
And I have been helping to set up a neighbor's Mandrake 10 installation, and trust me, the issues are as many, just different ones :-(
One more annoyance that I found -- but a reported bug that will get fixed -- is that in the default configuration, but with auto-spell check turned on, OOo will try to spell check every word in your document against every language in the known universe. Especially when loading a Finnish document: Finnish spell check isn't yet supported, so *every* word is legally mis-spelled. It loads all the dictionaries (600 MB of them!) and after several minutes of thrashing triggers an "out of memory: killed process" error. It took me several hours to hunt this one down. The workaround is to disable under the "options" menu all languages you're not interested in, i.e., most of them.
- Martin
Wow!
Funny you should say that, I'm watching OOo internationalization download on my update screen on my RC3 laptop right at this very moment! Figures :)
On a side note, anybody know how to have it automatically save all of the rpms downloaded on an update so that you can easily spool them to a new build on another machine? The rpms land in /var/spool/up2date, but are blown away on a regular basis. Now, I can copy them right after an update session to a saved directory of some kind, but that seems kind of clunky...
--FeriCyde...
Funny you should say that, I'm watching OOo internationalization download on my update screen on my RC3 laptop right at this very moment! Figures :)
On a side note, anybody know how to have it automatically save all of the rpms downloaded on an update so that you can easily spool them to a new build on another machine? The rpms land in /var/spool/up2date, but are blown away on a regular basis. Now, I can copy them right after an update session to a saved directory of some kind, but that seems kind of clunky...
--FeriCyde...
Paul,
I suppose that if you use yum, they are not arbitrarily deleted. "yum man" says: "Note that packages are not automatically deleted after they are downloaded." You have to run "yum clean packages" for that.
- Martin
I suppose that if you use yum, they are not arbitrarily deleted. "yum man" says: "Note that packages are not automatically deleted after they are downloaded." You have to run "yum clean packages" for that.
- Martin
Yum saves the rpms in /var/cache/yum. Up2date saves them in /var/spool/up2date.
-Steve Bergman
-Steve Bergman
I just copied them after a recent update from a bare-metal install -- it made a VMware install / update a breeze, but it, again, is kind of clunky. You run "up2date" again and it clears the old rpms and starts fresh, giving you a delta from one state of upgrade to another. You have to remember to copy/restore them if you're propogating them, which I guess is likely more my not RTFMing more than anything -- there has to be a switch that says "archive these puppies" -- oh well :)
--FeriCyde
--FeriCyde
Another problem I appear to be having is that my ssh-agents are multiplying like rabbits. Anybody found a solution to that? (no, abstention doesn't cut it :-)
mvermeer: I'll keep an eye out for this -- I've only got two running atm -- I have no idea why they're using it -- there must be some private key store somewhere that they're accessing through X is all I can figure.
Is there a reason to try FC 3?
I used to use FC 1 as an alternative to Red Hat (being a RH desktop user since 7.2) but decided against it after finding MEPIS. It wasn't that FC was bad...just that MEPIS was better.
Does anyone know the major changes between FC 1 through 3 (other than the obvious kernel updates, etc.)? I've read the changelogs but want to know from some that have used it for a while what the major improvements are. Not only that, but what advantages does it have over MEPIS? Just curious because I'd really like to give it a go...but am held back by the fantastic job SimplyMEPIS 2004.06 has done. Can anyone provide some testimony?
Does anyone know the major changes between FC 1 through 3 (other than the obvious kernel updates, etc.)? I've read the changelogs but want to know from some that have used it for a while what the major improvements are. Not only that, but what advantages does it have over MEPIS? Just curious because I'd really like to give it a go...but am held back by the fantastic job SimplyMEPIS 2004.06 has done. Can anyone provide some testimony?
Devnet,
I would suggest that you give FC3 a try. It is my distro of choice. No one can really answer the "which distro should I use?" question for anyone else.
(Yes, I know you qualified it as a FC1 vs FC3 question, but they *are* different distros.)
That said, I have not (yet) taken my own advice in this instance, since I have been meaning to try out MEPIS. It's doing quite well at "distrowatch" and seems like a distro that *might* suit my needs and tastes. (No Debian-based distro that I have tried ever really has.) I like FC3 because it is very "cutting edge". But cutting edges *can* make you bleed. It is stable enough that someone who is adept with Linux can make quite a nice server *or* desktop out of it.
People are using the term "polished" with respect to it, and perhaps they have had a different experience with it than I. But it is like any other Linux distro in that once it is fixed it *stays* fixed.
Live Long and Prosper, Steve Bergman
I would suggest that you give FC3 a try. It is my distro of choice. No one can really answer the "which distro should I use?" question for anyone else.
(Yes, I know you qualified it as a FC1 vs FC3 question, but they *are* different distros.)
That said, I have not (yet) taken my own advice in this instance, since I have been meaning to try out MEPIS. It's doing quite well at "distrowatch" and seems like a distro that *might* suit my needs and tastes. (No Debian-based distro that I have tried ever really has.) I like FC3 because it is very "cutting edge". But cutting edges *can* make you bleed. It is stable enough that someone who is adept with Linux can make quite a nice server *or* desktop out of it.
People are using the term "polished" with respect to it, and perhaps they have had a different experience with it than I. But it is like any other Linux distro in that once it is fixed it *stays* fixed.
Live Long and Prosper, Steve Bergman
Sbergman,
Thanks for the info. I'll give it a whirl sometime in the next 2 days. You'll absolutely love MEPIS. If you have a laptop you can spare...give it a try there. MEPIS really shines over even knoppix in hardware detection. I truly think it is one of the best out there. Thanks again!
Regards,
Devnet
Thanks for the info. I'll give it a whirl sometime in the next 2 days. You'll absolutely love MEPIS. If you have a laptop you can spare...give it a try there. MEPIS really shines over even knoppix in hardware detection. I truly think it is one of the best out there. Thanks again!
Regards,
Devnet
Gave this a try last night. Fantastic install and fantastic organization. I'm including this on a list of 5 distros that I will hot swap in and out of my main Linux system (depending on what mood I'm in :P). VAST improvements over FC1. I went ahead and snapped in a new kernel from source just to see what would happen...it played very nice. This is a very solid distro. It fell short on only a few places...mainly, sound, browser plugins, and command line updating...but overall, it is a great distro. Lots of eye candy is what I think attracts so many users to this distro...it is very visually pleasing from the install onward. Anyways, just my immediate take on it...I'll have to keep experimenting with it over the next week.
Regards,
Devnet
Regards,
Devnet
I'm loving it. I've got to give the new graphical installer a try, despite my command-line bend.
--FeriCyde
--FeriCyde
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Worth reading if you're a recent redhat or fedora user.
--FeriCyde