On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Frank Cox theatre@sasktel.net wrote:

On Wed, 24 Nov 2010 08:01:45 -0800 (PST) ann kok wrote:

...

1/ How can I get this program install if yum won't find it?

Generally speaking it's best to stick with rpm installs on a Centos system but if something consists of, for example, one single executable file, then you can just copy that anywhere that's convenient and run it from there.  (Put it in /usr/local/bin if you want multiple users to have access to it, put it into ~/bin if you just want to use it yourself.  That way it's on your default path.)

...

2/ Can I use fedora12 fping rpm to install on it?

Some Fedora srpms can be recompiled for Centos.  Sometimes it's a simple matter of "rpmbuild --rebuild whatever.srpm", sometimes you have to edit the .spec file to make it work.  And sometimes it doesn't work at all, depending on other factors like dependencies.

It's not as easy as one might hope: There are new guidelins for writing Fedora RPM's, such as the use of '%global' instead of '%define', that can be very confusing.

Also, the SRPM's from RHEL 6 and from Fedora 14 often have a 'docs' package that is compiled with the "BuildArch: noarch" option, which breaks the living tar out of compiling it unde CentOS 5.x or RHEL 5.x due to scattered debugifo debris which is not correctly bundled.