On Friday 06 Sep 2002 3:11 pm, Langsley T Russell wrote: > Is there any advantage to using RPMs to install applications other than > the presumed ease of installation? Is there any difference in the > installed product and how well it integrates into Mandrake? > > Whenever I see RPMs offered they invariably specify that they are for > Red Hat specifically and often one version of RH. The Mozilla download > for example says "RPMS for Red Hat 7.x". Is it reasonable to assume that > if it is an RPM it will work equally well on Mandrake even though it is > described as being for Red Hat X.X specifically? > > Any other comments or advice on the subject would definitely be welcome. > > LTR
RPMs are very much the best method of installing software in Mandrake. They contain a list of all the library files necessary for the application to run. These are the 'dependencies' The RPM will not install unless all these dependencies are resolved, so you can be fairly confident that so long as it was packaged properly the application should work if it installs. Because different distros package their systems differently you cannot assume an RPM packaged for one distro will work with another. So for example Suse packages usually will not work with Mandrake. However because Mandrake is itself a fork of RedHat, then RedHat packages 'usually' work with Mandrake. However you can usually find a package specifically for Mandrake for most apps if you look in the right place. Try looking in www.rpmfind.net plf.zarb.org ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/contrib/texstar/ http://ranger.dnsalias.com/mandrake/mandrake8.2/ Here for example you will find a Mandrake RPM for Mozilla (The RedHat Mozilla RPM will probably work, but you will find things like menu entries might be missing.) BTW: when installing RPMS using the urpmi command is better than the rpm command. urpmi allows you to define a list of download locations and then you would only have to type urpmi mozilla and it will find the latest copy of mozilla from the download locations and then install it and any dependency RPMS automatically. Read Rangers front page (link given above) for instructions on adding download locations for urpmi derek
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