New to Fedora, but not to Linux

[JonathanR]

OK, so I've been posting a bit. I am also new to Fedora, although I am not new to Linux. I started in Linux in 1999 with Slackware. I also tried Red Hat 7.3. Or was it 7.1? Anyway, I didn't much care for Red Hat at the time. I didn't like Anaconda. At the time I liked GNOME. I then gave Mandrake a try and stayed with them from 8.0 to 10.0 Beta, at which point I got sick of urpmi and went to SuSE at 9.1. Stayed with SuSE till it became openSUSE, in which I just left 11.1. Before I made the switch, I spent time reading reviews and this forum and the documentation.

[bob]

Well, good to have you here and sharing your knowledge. Now that you've found Fedora again, there's no need to look further....hmmmm....Distrowatch today...Nexenta...hmmm. :D

[Dan]

Oooooh! Vector has a new one out! <..:eek:..>

I'm off to do some downloading for a while! <..:D..>



EDIT: Hmmmm.

Typical of Vector. They've got some really snazzy (http://vectorlinux.com/screenshots/dlxnd4.png/image_view_fullscreen) graphics (http://vectorlinux.com/screenshots/22.png/image_view_fullscreen) going on there!

[bob]

Got it running on a partition. Pretty nice, but then I've always liked Vector. The only 'glitch' is that it's the first distro in ages to fail to turn on my cable connection during boot. Two clicks and it's on, but something was borked during the install. And, of course, it's still using LILO, so there's always the minor workaround.

[JonathanR]

Thank you for the welcome. I used to go by the nick, linux_learner. I chose it because I consider myself the perpetual student of Linux. Once I started getting more involved with smart package manager, I decided a name change was in order to make it appear more "professional".

As you may have noticed, I spend a lot of my time studying package management. I still won't consider myself an expert, as I know a lot of people who know more than I. One thing I'd like to do is write a gui for rpm. To me, it doesn't make sense to have a package manager like yum or smart or YaST for the package manager such as rpm. A package manager for the package manager. I find that in general, people just don't know a lot about rpm.

Some years ago, I wrote a security overview. I'd link you to it, but it's seriously out of date. I really need to rewrite that. As you can see, I kinda have my hands full rewriting the documentation for smart, wanting to write a gui for rpm (which means learning gtk+, pygtk, c++, and python), and updating the security documentation.

[stefan1975]

As you may have noticed, I spend a lot of my time studying package management. I still won't consider myself an expert, as I know a lot of people who know more than I. One thing I'd like to do is write a gui for rpm. To me, it doesn't make sense to have a package manager like yum or smart or YaST for the package manager such as rpm. A package manager for the package manager. I find that in general, people just don't know a lot about rpm. .

maybe i am missing the point here, but aren't yumex, packagekit, kpackagekit graphical frontends for packagemanagent on redhat based distros?

me personally i prefer yum on the CLI SOOOoooo much over and GUI i have seen so far but that is just personal taste i guess. I'd say that with smart opensuse also finally have something to be proud of (over YUCK2) and the next edition will even have bash-completion i hear, now that is a pretty neat feature I would like to see in yum, just as they have (like ubuntu) package suggestions when stuff is not installed when you enter a command.

But for me no packagemanagement GUI's, just give me pacman, apt-get, smart or even yum and I am quite happy.

And I personally wouldn't really call rpm a packagemanager in todays view. I mean it does not do anything modern utilities like yum do like dependency hell prevention. delta-rpm installation, mirror checking, downloading packages, upgrading, etc.

stefan

[JonathanR]

maybe i am missing the point here, but aren't yumex, packagekit, kpackagekit graphical frontends for packagemanagent on redhat based distros?

me personally i prefer yum on the CLI SOOOoooo much over and GUI i have seen so far but that is just personal taste i guess. I'd say that with smart opensuse also finally have something to be proud of (over YUCK2) and the next edition will even have bash-completion i hear, now that is a pretty neat feature I would like to see in yum, just as they have (like ubuntu) package suggestions when stuff is not installed when you enter a command.

But for me no packagemanagement GUI's, just give me pacman, apt-get, smart or even yum and I am quite happy.

And I personally wouldn't really call rpm a packagemanager in todays view. I mean it does not do anything modern utilities like yum do like dependency hell prevention. delta-rpm installation, mirror checking, downloading packages, upgrading, etc.

stefan


You raise some good points. That is precisely why I want to make a gui for rpm. When was the last time the gui accurately represented the cli? Or had all the functions that are available in cli? I don't want to make just some generic gui. If I did, I wouldn't even bother, as kpackage already does this.

Packagekit is yet another overlay to the package manager. http://www.packagekit.org/pk-intro.html

What is PackageKit?

PackageKit is a system designed to make installing and updating software on your computer easier. The primary design goal is to unify all the software graphical tools used in different distributions, and use some of the latest technology like PolicyKit to make the process suck less.

The actual nuts-and-bolts distro tool (yum, apt, conary, etc) is used by PackageKit using compiled and scripted helpers. PackageKit isn't meant to replace these tools, instead providing a common set of abstractions that can be used by standard GUI and text mode package managers.

PackageKit itself is a system activated daemon called packagekitd. Being system activated means that it's only being run when the user is using a text mode or graphical tool, and quits when it's no longer being used. This means we don't delay the boot sequence or session startup and don't consume memory when not being used. <--snip-->

[stefan1975]

You raise some good points. That is precisely why I want to make a gui for rpm. When was the last time the gui accurately represented the cli? Or had all the functions that are available in cli? I don't want to make just some generic gui. If I did, I wouldn't even bother, as kpackage already does this.

Packagekit is yet another overlay to the package manager. http://www.packagekit.org/pk-intro.html

I am trying to understand the niche you are trying to fill by accomplishing this.

I mean I think powerusers (of which I consider myself one) prefer using the CLI over a yumex/packagekit/JR gui. Speaking for myself I feel that a "$ su -c 'yum search solitaire'" is considerably faster then doing so in a GUI.

On the other hand casual users just want to point and click. I mean my dad just wants to fire up a simply, clean, basic GUI where he clicks "games" and selects "solitaire" for installation and would get really confused if there were more options available to him.

Of course it is really cool material and building something to suit your needs or the needs of a group of people is really satisfying and worthy of encouragement.

Stefan

[JonathanR]

I am trying to understand the niche you are trying to fill by accomplishing this.

I mean I think powerusers (of which I consider myself one) prefer using the CLI over a yumex/packagekit/JR gui. Speaking for myself I feel that a "$ su -c 'yum search solitaire'" is considerably faster then doing so in a GUI.

On the other hand casual users just want to point and click. I mean my dad just wants to fire up a simply, clean, basic GUI where he clicks "games" and selects "solitaire" for installation and would get really confused if there were more options available to him.

Of course it is really cool material and building something to suit your needs or the needs of a group of people is really satisfying and worthy of encouragement.

Stefan

The gui could be used by power users, and by those that are not. Do you know how to add repos to rpm? What about rpm macros? There are all kinds of things that rpm can do that most just don't know, so they rely on other tools like yum, or YaST, or packagekit. To me, what doesn't make sense is to use packagekit>yum>rpm. Why not go straight to rpm.