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 recently erased Fedora 9 from my hard drive, and installed Linux Mint. Im enjoying it so far but it didn’t come with a webserver. Heres a little tutorial on how to install XAMPP and get it up and running.
First of all, download XAMPP from sourceforge. As of writing this, the latest version is 1.6.7 so ill be referencing to that in the tutorial. Save it to your /home/$USER/ directory.
Extract the archive to your /opt/ directory.
sudo tar xvfz xampp-linux-1.6.7.tar.gz -C /opt
Now its installed 
To start it:
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start
To stop it:
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start
To launch the panel/manager:
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp panel
You can test if its on by going to http://localhost
To add files to the server, you would need to put them in /opt/lampp/htdocs/ but since that directory is owned by root, your user doesn’t have neccesary privilages. The easiest way to “get around” this is to set up a symlink folder in your home directory. You may be familiar with public_html or www directories on your webhosting, we are basically setting the same thing up here.
First we want to set up the directory we are going to link to in htdocs. So..
sudo mkdir /opt/lampp/htdocs/homefiles/
Then make the equivilant directory in our home directory.
mkdir ~/public_html/
And finally link them together.
sudo…
A little screencast i made just showing the linux dropbox client off.
Ive recorded another video tutorial, this time on Fedora 9, showing how you can make your own screencasts/video tutorials on linux. I tell you how to (sorta) get your microphone working and use the recordmydesktop program.
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 GNOME desktop, i quickly…
The 8th version of Ubuntu has now been released! Notable inclusions are..
- Linux Kernel 2.6.24
- Xorg 7.3 (Latest)
- GNOME 2.22
- Firefox 3 Beta 5
Its interesting to see that they’ve given some
of their older applications an overhaul. It now includes the Brasero CD burning utility which replaces Serpentine. They’ve also included the GTK front-end bit-torrent client Transmission and added a new VNC viewer called Vinagre. If you put the burnt ISO disk into a Windows machine, you can install Ubuntu via Windows! I thought this was a cool little feature.
Ive been following Ubuntu for a few years now, i started Using Hoary right through to Fiesty. After that Ubuntu wasn’t right for me. It felt pretty bloated, trying to do things for you, and now im happily running Zenwalk 5.0 which is based off Slackware. I’m interested to here what you think, of Ubuntu and the new release.
Heres a tutorial on how to use the apt-get package management system in Debian and its derivitives such as Ubuntu and Knoppix. I will cover command line use of apt-get, the aptitude program and the Synaptic Package Manager. I wrote all of this myself, feel free to link to here but do not copy and paste it.
Debian uses apt-get package management. It looks at a series of defined repositories (servers) for the package(s) you want and will download them if they are there. The repositories are defined in the file
/etc/apt/sources.list
You can edit that file directly (make sure you have root) or use frontends like the Synaptic Package Manager or Software Sources (Menu item) in the distro.
Command Line Usage
To install a package you need to use the apt-get install command. For example to install the IRC program XChat you would type into the console.
sudo apt-get install xchat
It would prompt you for your root password and then list information about the package and would double check you still want to download and install it.
To remove a package you would use the apt-get remove command. This will remove the package files but will keep the configuration files incase you install the same application…
