Temlakos wrote:
Ahhh right, cool ...
Then I'd like to share with you my experience with obtaining and updating mplayer. because that might have a bearing on that particular problem that you had.
Mplayer is out in what its developers are afraid might be their last version--something about the European Parliament passing a law against any player that can play anybody's content. Anyway, FreshRPMS has the only version of mplayer that seems actually to work. Livna's version of MPlayer just won't load, and won't stay loaded when I try to open a video with it.
So I looked up the listing for mplayer in smart, and found that yes, FreshRPMS has it, but I had set its priority down to 8, rather than the 10 I use for base, updates-released, extras, livna, and others.
To fix that problem I granted an /exception/ to FreshRPMS's version of mplayer: I declared that /that package alone/ would carry a priority of 10, equal to that of livna's version, so that smart would take the newer of the two versions. You can do that in smart--right-click the package name and reassign its priority directly. Since then, smart has obeyed my instructions, and I still have a working version of mplayer on my system--though I am using livna's version of the mplayer fonts. (They are in fact compatible.)
I need livna to provide semi-official support in Fedora for mp3 and any other file that Fedora can't have in its official repos, because mp3 is not licensed in a way compatible with GNU-GPL.
By the way: smart is up to version 0.36. I took the tarball and discovered, to my delight, that the Makefile has a routine not only to "make" the program and its C extension, but /also/ to build the RPM! To use it, unpack the file (it's a bz2 archive, so you'll have to right-click and "open with Archive Manager" to do it), change to that directly, and then--not as root, but as an ordinary user--run these two commands in this order:
$ make $ make rpm
Then change to a directly called "dist". You'll have two binary RPM's, a source RPM, and even a brand-new tarball.
Then you can issue the command
$ su --command="rpm -Uvh smart*"
Or do what I did:
1. Set up your very own yum-style repository:
A. Create a directory in /var/lib--say, /var/lib/yum. B. Copy the two RPM's to it--and any other RPM that you build or acquire. C. Chown all rpm's to root: # chown root *.rpm D. Chmod all rpm's to 755: # chmod 755 *.rpm C. Issue this command:
# createrepo /var/lib/yum [or however you named your folder]
2. In /etc/yum.repos.d/, write a .repo file to point to your new repo. Give it a baseurl of "file:///var/lib/yum" or whatever.
3. Execute the command:
# yum install smart
Then you can run smart, configure it to recognize your RPM installed base (you have a channel type just for that) and all your repos, set their priorities--and you're in business.
For everyone's information, I followed Michael A. Peters' advice and set up an environment to build my own rpm's, which is the best and safest way to install java onto an FC4 installation. (The release notes warn you not to use Sun's own rpm for java.) After that, I knew I simply /had/ to invent a system to manage all those rpm's from smart. So I created my own repo. I am very pleased with the results I have obtained.
Temlakos
Well I usually stuck with cmd-line version of smart, not keen on many GUI versions of such things.
I was very impressed as I mensioned with Smart, and I will defintely try it again, as I think if one package manager can take over from all others - or at least be used on every distro, it will be an advantage (although I'm sure Debian users will not wish to move away from apt, understandable however).
Regards,
Sean
