Matt Croydon::Postneo

Day: March 10, 2004

  • Mandrake 10: Impressive!

    In catching up on Slashdot, I found this story about the relase of Mandrake 10 Community.  Your best bet for downloading right now is via this BitTorrent link.  I’m extremely impressed with what Mandrake 10 bundles: Kernel 2.6.3 (2.6 is ready for prime time!), Xfree 4.3, GCC 3.3.2, Apache 2.0.48, Samba 3.0.2, MySQL 4.0.18, KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.4.2, OOo 1.1, and I think there’s a partridge in there somewhere.  The full package list is exhaustive.

    My most recent experience with El Drake was with 9.1, and I was extremely impressed.  I’m going to download this latest release and check it out tonight.  Mandrake would have been my distro of choice on my laptop, except for the pesky PCMCIA issue.  I’m currently dual-booting XP and SuSE 9 on my laptop.

    I look forward to playing around with it.  The screenshots that I’ve seen so far look good, and there’s quite a bit of good stuff going on under the hood.

  • Apt and Fedora

    I know that I had read about Apt for Red Hat and Fedora before, but it was mind boggling to see it in action.  I was talking to Erik about updating RH/Fedora and eventually found my way to ayo.freshrpms.net.  I don’t have any experience with Yum, but the thought of running Apt on a fresh Fedora box excited me.

    After grabbing Apt for Fedora, I issed the following commands (I didn’t include the list of packages):

    [root@localhost matt]# rpm -Uvh apt-0.5.15cnc3-0.1.fr.i386.rpm
    warning: apt-0.5.15cnc3-0.1.fr.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID e42d547 b
    Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
    1:apt ########################################### [100%]
    [root@localhost matt]# apt-get update
    Get:1 http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386 release [1990B]
    Fetched 1990B in 0s (5305B/s)
    Get:1 http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/core pkglist [1445kB]
    Get:2 http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/core release [151B]
    Get:3 http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/updates pkglist [288kB]
    Get:4 http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/updates release [157B]
    Get:5 http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/freshrpms pkglist [159kB]
    Get:6 http://ayo.freshrpms.net fedora/linux/1/i386/freshrpms release [161B]
    Fetched 1893kB in 9s (202kB/s)
    Reading Package Lists... Done
    Building Dependency Tree... Done
    [root@localhost matt]# apt-get dist-upgrade
    Reading Package Lists... Done
    Building Dependency Tree... Done
    Calculating Upgrade... Done
    The following packages will be upgraded
    [ ... big list of 106 packages goes here ... ]
    The following NEW packages will be installed:
    [ ... 5 packages here ... ]
    106 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 removed and 0 not upgraded.
    Need to get 206MB of archives.
    After unpacking 26.5MB of additional disk space will be used.
    Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

    I said yes to the prompt, and apt downloaded installed everything for me.  *Bing*  System up to date.  From this sources.list, it looks like you can make Apt work all the way back to Red Hat 6.2.  You should be able to apt-get install just about anything you need as long as it is in the repository.

    Of course, don’t use this on an important system without reading a lot about it first.  It will help me keep my fedora test box up to date though.