-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 El Miércoles, 7 de Abril de 2004 18:16, pinco escribió: > I don't think I lack of experience in computer matters, even if I'm > not an expert (see my homepage), but I'm really frustrated with Linux > (Fedora). IMHO what you should do is downloading some other distros, like Mandrake or SuSE and try them. So you can choose which one fits you best. Sometimes the choice of a distro is just a subjective matter. > Since I'm not happy with MS policy I'm trying to switch to Linux, but > until now very few programs I succeeded to install without wasting a > lot of time and even so I didn't succeed. Perhaps the key question is "How" you tryed to install the stuff... Linux has a very different approach to software management than other OSes; the software management is done with rpm which installs individual packages and at a higher lever applications like apt, yum and up2date which implements more complex tasks; If you are going to install a single RPM file you can make: rpm -Uvh packatge.rpm (You can do this even with an URL as a parameter) The problem is that many packages have dependencies on other packages; in the Win32 world this would be the case when a given program depends on DirectX9 or a given DLL, allthougt the net of dependencies is much larger in free software packages. This is a main reason for a package failing to install. In order to avoid messing around with the deps, what you need is using a tool which does all the hard work for you: YUM or APT Yum ships off-the-box with the Fedora distro. Another difference with plain rpm is that this applications retrieve the software from a remote mirror, so you do'n even have to search for them. If you want a package to be installed the only thing yum needs to know is the name of the package: yum install apt This would install the package called 'apt' if a copy exist in the repositories listed in yum's config file (/etc/yum.conf). The inverse operation is also possible: yum remove apt Furthermore, you can get lot's of info with the command: man 1 yum Or from you favorite desktop's help system, searching in the 'system manuals' section or using the 'search' textinput widget. Another handy option is keeping your system up to date qith all the upgrades and security fixes: yum upgrade In order to have your database updated you will need to run: yum update at least once a week. There are also some nice GUI tools: *up2date , which does only udates, no new software instalation, but it's quite handy as it works from an panel icon which tells you if there is new stuff available. *Synaptic: which is the GUI frontend for apt And finally Red-Carpet which you can get at Ximians site http://www.ximian.com/products/redcarpet/ This is an amazing app, try it. > For some application, as I understood, I should have different > programs because they depend on others: OpenOffice use Mozilla, so > even if I don't like this browser I must have its libraries, if I > decide to use Gnome I must have even the KDE libraries, because some > programs require them, and so on. Read above. > Hardware should be compatible, so I have to buy new ones. (Yes, I > wrote to the firms asking for drivers, but in the meanwhile...) ¿?¿?¿?¿ Harware *is* in it's 99% compatible, as long as it is PC hardware it will surely work. In the most cases drivers are completely unnecesary. I even have a USB pen-cam attached and it worked out of the box, it's a quite rare one, a German 'El-Cheapo' thingy bought in Aldi for 49€. The only things for which you will need a driver is for graphics cards (they work with the included drivers, but best performance is achived with the official ones) and some PCI modems (the infamouse 'winmodems' or 'soft modems'). Every thing else needs normally only a kernel module which in the most cases comes with the standard kernel of the distro. You have got a lot of feedback from the community, I hope this will show you the *main* difference with the M$ world: We are a community. So, welcome to the brave free world of the Linux-geeks and I hope you will get your problems fixed. - -- R3G4RDZ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAdVUQdC7YcERnEMoRAufiAKCp7Z2cquCh4HTknpmc5AgaqeAQGQCfd0T1 fA1Egcvq3IzCTmcMiy7p0Bc= =j4HW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
