One of the main whinges about Fedora Core 2 is that is it's "pure' open source software i.e. no closed source software (or software with non-open licences) is included. Whilst this is fine for the Debian-style purists, it makes life awkward for the rest of us. Time and time again, folks installing Fedora Core have to go through the treadmill of checking for new versions, agreeing to some license or other, downloading it, possibly having to run something to unpack it and even then it's not obvious (e.g. the classic "soft-link in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins for the Java plug-in or editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf for the Nvidia 3D drivers and so on).
Hence, I've started work on a large shell script that will automate as much as this as possible. BTW, if you just say "set up a yum repository", remember this is for stuff that's mostly closed source and often has some redistribution restrictions on it as well.
Here's the initial output from an early version of the script:
Code:
Scanning currently installed packages...
Package Installed Latest Needs Update?
Java SDK 1.4.2_05 1.4.2_05 No
Java JRE 1.4.2_05 1.4.2_05 No
Flash Player 7.0.25 7.0.25 No
Xine Player 040718 040718 No
Xine Codecs 0.52 0.52 No
Xine Library 040718 040718 No
Xine Decryption 1.2.8 1.2.8 No
Opera Browser 7.52 7.52 No
Nvidia 3D Drivers 1.0-6106 1.0-6106 No
It scans the official Web sites for update versions and if there is one, it will pick up the new version number. If it's run as root, it'll also prompt for an update - e.g. here's what happened after I did an "rpm -e opera":
Code:
Scanning currently installed packages...
Package Installed Latest Needs Update?
Java SDK 1.4.2_05 1.4.2_05 No
Java JRE 1.4.2_05 1.4.2_05 No
Flash Player 7.0.25 7.0.25 No
Xine Player 040718 040718 No
Xine Codecs 0.52 0.52 No
Xine Library 040718 040718 No
Xine Decryption 1.2.8 1.2.8 No
Opera Browser None 7.52 Yes
Nvidia 3D Drivers 1.0-6106 1.0-6106 No
Update packages (y/n) ? y
Downloading Opera Browser 7.52 RPM (may take a long time)...
Installing Opera Browser 7.52 RPM...
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:opera ########################################### [100%]
Scanning currently installed packages...
Package Installed Latest Needs Update?
Java SDK 1.4.2_05 1.4.2_05 No
Java JRE 1.4.2_05 1.4.2_05 No
Flash Player 7.0.25 7.0.25 No
Xine Player 040718 040718 No
Xine Codecs 0.52 0.52 No
Xine Library 040718 040718 No
Xine Decryption 1.2.8 1.2.8 No
Opera Browser 7.52 7.52 No
Nvidia 3D Drivers 1.0-6106 1.0-6106 No
Obviously, I'll be adding more third-party stuff over time (would like Real Player in there, but not sure if there's any "official" RPMs out there for Real Player 9). And it shouldn't list all the stuff by default (-a option should do that, otherwise there should be some sort of -p option to individually check your favourite packages - you might not want both the Java SDK and JRE installed for instance).
This little script project is really just a way to persuade the FC maintainers to put something like it on their system (only snag is that it relies on the HTML of Web sites not changing their format, so can be fragile if not frequently updated). BTW, did you know that some Opera official mirrors don't have the Linux RPMs on them...tut tut...
Any thoughts on this? Am I wasting my time doing this?
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