Fedora 9 includes the new package manager called Package Kit. It aims to be the package manager for your system, as it can install apts, slackware packages,rpms and many other file formats. I booted into it and noticed 2 things.
- The first, its incredibly slow – It took along time to download the updates i needed (Slower than downloading a normal file that size from the server) and it took along time to generate the meta data of plugins list.
- The second is that (in my opnion) the User Interface is horrible. Its hard to navigate to select the packages you want, When you select a package it takes a few more clicks to even see the dependencies it requires, whereas adept and synaptic show you right away.
I tried it, i can honestly say i gave it a good go, but its not for me. Since im new to the rpm system, i searched around for alternatives, i found one called Yum Extender (Yumex). Its easy to install, just yum install yumex or download it from the websit.
I was lucky enough to get chosen to be one of the 25 alpha testers for the linux dropbox client. We were given the choice to download a precomiled .deb, or the source code. Since i use Fedora, i opted for the source code. I attempted to compile it and then i came across some dependency issues.There were 2-3 packages that i needed to find work arounds for, they weren’t in the default repositories and for one (i think) there wasn’t a package for it so i needed to compile it.
I eventually was able to compile it without any errors. It did need a system restart to take effect, but low and behold.
I was getting some problems with the latest Ubuntu release (ext3 didn’t agree with ubuntu) so i decided to try another distro. Ive always been an apt-get man so i wanted to try something different. I downoloaded the Fedora 9 DVD and popped it in the drive.
I couldn’t use the GUI installer as there was some conflict with my monitor, so i need to use the text based installer. Its no big hassle for me, ive used the text base installer on slackware and other distros. The anaconda installer is great, i selected the programs i wanted to install and install. All up the install only took around 20-25 minutes – very speedy considering i installed gnome, xfce, servers, dev tools and a number of other things. Once the installation had finished i rebooted.
Straight away i noticed that i didn’t have an X server. When you run Fedora for the first time, im pretty sure theres a little dialog that lets you make accounts etc.. unfortunately there was no text option for me and i got left with a command prompt. I was forced to login as root. I tried startx and it worked! I was in the…
Subscribe to feeds
