Scott Ehrlich wrote:
I just installed CentOS 4.4 on my laptop, having good experience with Debian, Fedora Core 5, and RHEL4. I really like 4.4's overall appearance (meshing of RHEL4 and FC5),
Eh? 4.4 is pure RHEL 4U4, there's nothing "meshed" in there from FC5.
but what I have yet to figure out is how to access repositories for applications that are not part of the default install, such as ncftp. I invoked and updated yum, but it had no idea.
http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories
I would also like to see what all available kernel offerings are, and maybe various development tools (i.e. dependencies).
http://www.centos.org/docs/4/html/yum/ - maybe you're looking for the "group" commands in yum?
yum list "kernel*" would show all available packages beginning with "kernel".
Up2Date didn't seem much of a help, either.
Well, it's in there because of upstream compatibility but really uses yum as its backend.
None of the above tools seemed to know anything about ncftp, and it has been around for at least 10 years, and is available for just about every distro, sometimes by default.
It's not in CentOS by default, but may be in one of the other repositories (see the wiki link above).
Am I missing something with available packages?
You could use lftp, which is pretty similar ...
Cheers,
Ralph