I have been using Fedora on my home desktop for close to an year, and I am happy with it, nevertheless I am considering switching to a slower-moving distro.
CentOS + EPEL put together have less packages than Fedora. Moreover RPM Fusion has fewer packages for EL than for Fedora. I am wondering how can I install on my PC applications for which packages do not exist from one of the above-mentioned repos.
I can go upstream, get sources and build them. It is a good solution, I do that even with Fedora, however this can mean a lot of work when a package depends on 10 others.
So I wonder what do other CentOS users do in a similar situation? Is it possible to get a Fedora binary package and install it? What about getting a Fedora source package, building and installing it? Is there any other possibility?
I have been using Fedora on my home desktop for close to an year, and I am happy with it, nevertheless I am considering switching to a slower-moving distro.
I followed the same path a few years ago, and I'm very happy with it. So, welcome!
CentOS + EPEL put together have less packages than Fedora. Moreover
I use CentOS + EPEL as a base and include specific packages from RPMForge, using includepkgs in the /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo file.
For example my (very personal) package list from RPMForge:
includepkgs=pam_keyring pbzip2 subversion* mod_dav_svn bonnie++ xplanet xplanet-maps filezilla allegro* unrar aircrack-ng python-reportlab python-psycopg drupal6 powertop fuse-davfs2 dropbox* nautilus-dropbox gtkimageview*
I used RPMFusion when on Fedora and found it a great repo, but on CentOS, RPMForge is much more complete and of better quality IMHO
I can go upstream, get sources and build them. It is a good solution,
I build locally very rarely and only when I need something quick on my workstation that I know I will use once (I don't even install it and run the binaries directly when possible).
it possible to get a Fedora binary package and install it? What about
in general, no
getting a Fedora source package, building and installing it? Is there
Yes and it is pretty straightforward for a lot of them.
Just first unzip the Fedora SRPM with the Archive Manager and copy the files in rpmbuild/SOURCES and rpmbuild/SPECS (the RPM format somehow changed around Fedora 9 or 10, so rpm -Uvh *.src.rpm won't work with recent Fedora versions)
However for some packages you will see that they depend on recent versions of some software, especially the graphical environment libraries (GTK/GNOME or Qt/KDE). In that case there is not much you can do, because you don't want to update core libraries of CentOS (if yous start going that way, you should rather keep using Fedora or use Ubuntu...)
An approach is then to look at earlier Fedora versions until you find a version of the software which is still compatible with the CentOS libraries. CentOS is more or less compatible with Fedora 6, but I found that up to Fedora 9 most packages rebuild easily
On 6 November 2010 12:00, Mathieu Baudier mbaudier@argeo.org wrote:
I use CentOS + EPEL as a base and include specific packages from RPMForge, using includepkgs in the /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo file.
For example my (very personal) package list from RPMForge:
Thanks a lot for the detailed and helpful answer. You answered all my questions!
In particular I had never heard of RPMForge, I will check it.
An approach is then to look at earlier Fedora versions until you find a version of the software which is still compatible with the CentOS libraries. CentOS is more or less compatible with Fedora 6, but I found that up to Fedora 9 most packages rebuild easily
I checked my local mirror and it has packages from Fedora 7 onwards, so there seem to be a way.
In particular I had never heard of RPMForge, I will check it.
Also check ElRepo for up to date drivers (e.g. NVIDIA): http://elrepo.org
More generally the CentOS wiki is a very helpful resource, e.g.: http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories
At Sat, 6 Nov 2010 11:31:18 +0000 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
I have been using Fedora on my home desktop for close to an year, and I am happy with it, nevertheless I am considering switching to a slower-moving distro.
CentOS + EPEL put together have less packages than Fedora. Moreover RPM Fusion has fewer packages for EL than for Fedora. I am wondering how can I install on my PC applications for which packages do not exist from one of the above-mentioned repos.
I can go upstream, get sources and build them. It is a good solution, I do that even with Fedora, however this can mean a lot of work when a package depends on 10 others.
So I wonder what do other CentOS users do in a similar situation? Is it possible to get a Fedora binary package and install it? What about getting a Fedora source package, building and installing it? Is there any other possibility?
RPMForge has a lot of packages (but be careful!). rpmbone has more.
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On 6 November 2010 12:57, Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com wrote:
RPMForge has a lot of packages (but be careful!). rpmbone has more.
Careful about what?
RPMForge has a lot of packages (but be careful!). rpmbone has more.
Careful about what?
Third-party repos sometimes conflict. For example if you activate both EPEL and RPMForge fully, it is very likely that your perl-* packages will be a complete mess.
That's why I personally followed the approach of enabling EPEL (almost) fully and then include RPMForge packages one by one (see my previous mail)
It could be done the other way around, using primarily RPMForge and then picking up EPEL packages one by one. RPMForge is "stronger" on multimedia, up-to-date versions etc., but EPEL is a Fedora project and many packages have the same maintainer in EPEL and Fedora. So, by using it you stay more in the "Red Hat family", since RHEL (and thus CentOS) releases are based on Fedora.
A recommended approach is also to use the yum priorities plugin: http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities
On 6 November 2010 13:57, Mathieu Baudier mbaudier@argeo.org wrote:
Third-party repos sometimes conflict. For example if you activate both EPEL and RPMForge fully, it is very likely that your perl-* packages will be a complete mess.
That's why I personally followed the approach of enabling EPEL (almost) fully and then include RPMForge packages one by one (see my previous mail)
It could be done the other way around, using primarily RPMForge and then picking up EPEL packages one by one. RPMForge is "stronger" on multimedia, up-to-date versions etc., but EPEL is a Fedora project and many packages have the same maintainer in EPEL and Fedora. So, by using it you stay more in the "Red Hat family", since RHEL (and thus CentOS) releases are based on Fedora.
Thanks, I will keep that in mind. In fact I also had the same problem with Fedora, whereby some Atrpms packages conflicted with those from mainline Fedora or RPM Fusion, so I ended up disabling Atrpms and enabling it only when grabbing individual packages.
At Sat, 6 Nov 2010 13:15:20 +0000 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
On 6 November 2010 12:57, Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com wrote:
RPMForge has a lot of packages (but be careful!). rpmbone has more.
Careful about what?
Conflicts with EPel and 'interesting' dependency issues. So long as you do things like use priorities and don't leave RPMForge enabled by default and only enable it on the command line when you install specific packages. Or explicitly list the packages you are getting from RPMForge.
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 13:31, Piscium groknok@gmail.com wrote:
I have been using Fedora on my home desktop for close to an year, and I am happy with it, nevertheless I am considering switching to a slower-moving distro.
CentOS + EPEL put together have less packages than Fedora. Moreover RPM Fusion has fewer packages for EL than for Fedora. I am wondering how can I install on my PC applications for which packages do not exist from one of the above-mentioned repos.
I can go upstream, get sources and build them. It is a good solution, I do that even with Fedora, however this can mean a lot of work when a package depends on 10 others.
So I wonder what do other CentOS users do in a similar situation? Is it possible to get a Fedora binary package and install it? What about getting a Fedora source package, building and installing it? Is there any other possibility?
Are there any specific applications that you need but are not available in the CentOS repos, or just in general? My experience is that I had to build Anki [1], as no current version was available for either CentOS or Fedora.
[1] http://ichi2.net/anki/#linux
On 6 November 2010 13:22, Dotan Cohen dotancohen@gmail.com wrote:
Are there any specific applications that you need but are not available in the CentOS repos, or just in general? My experience is that I had to build Anki [1], as no current version was available for either CentOS or Fedora.
I like Tomboy, which in turn requires the mono stack, and neither is available on CentOS nor EPEL. I could use gnote as an alternative, though, it also is not available at those two repos either.
And I use the Flash player and Acrobat reader from the Adobe repo. Can they be used on CentOS?
And I like to listen to radio over the Internet, so I use different streaming protocols, codecs and players plugged in to Firefox.
So yes, with codecs, flash, players and so on I am asking for trouble. I would say half of the reliability issues I have with Fedora are related to Firefox and media plugins and codecs. Hopefully with CentOS I would have less Gnome issues and kernel oops.
Anyway, Fedora 12 was very reliable on my hardware, but I have a number of issues with Fedora 13. I could try to upgrade to Fedora 14 but perhaps I will wait instead for CentOS 6. Apparently it is largely based on Fedora 12 so I would expect it would work well on my PC.
On Sat, 06 Nov 2010 11:31:18 +0000 Piscium wrote:
So I wonder what do other CentOS users do in a similar situation? Is it possible to get a Fedora binary package and install it? What about getting a Fedora source package, building and installing it? Is there any other possibility?
For a few programs that don't seem to be (readily) available for Centos I just take some steps to create/compile my own rpm. Sometimes all it takes is a simple "rpmbuild --rebuild" command on a Fedora rpm, sometimes it takes a bit more than that.
You can find "my" Centos rpms here:
http://www.melvilletheatre.com/articles/el5/index.html
On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 19:35, Frank Cox theatre@sasktel.net wrote:
For a few programs that don't seem to be (readily) available for Centos I just take some steps to create/compile my own rpm. Sometimes all it takes is a simple "rpmbuild --rebuild" command on a Fedora rpm, sometimes it takes a bit more than that.
Thanks, I did not know that this was possible!
You can find "my" Centos rpms here:
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Dotan Cohen -
Frank Cox -
Mathieu Baudier -
Piscium -
Robert Heller