On Fri, 2005-10-07 at 21:03 +0900, Dave Gutteridge wrote: > I'm on board with that. But when I wanted to install Quanta, I was > given > advice on this list that the KDE repos necessary to get it were safe. Opinions and quality of advice will vary. [I remember causing you to corrupt a M$ vfat disk by not giving enough warnings on fstab flags that caused alfa dosfsck to run.] Advice on KDE repos seems, at best, mixed - seems to work well for some, but other knowledgeable people strongly advise against it. > I'm not pointing fingers, just saying that I'm in a bit of a swirling > vortex of advice, and it doesn't always line up. And I don't have the > skills to to discern which side of advice that conflicts that I should > follow. <sarcasm> So what else is new? :-) </sarcasm> If anyone has a good answer for this problem, I'm sure the whole open- source community would like to hear it. Often it's going to be cut-and- try even for the most knowledgeable. > If I want to install something like Quanta, or any other software that > isn't in Dag or the official CentOS repos, then I might as well just > consider it not available? If I can't find things I want/need in EL4 repos (or in general distro- specific repos), I try to find *.src.rpm, rebuild, and populate my local repos. If this fails, I sometimes "cherry-pick" other repos for binary rpms, or [as a last resort] source tarballs, but enabling non-EL- compatible repos is to be avoided IMHO. Which EL4 repos to use is also, unfortunately, more of an art than a science. I find kbs, dag, and dries generally play well together and with the core repos, but atrpms is much trickier, even for EL4 packages - I just cherry-pick that one, usually with Smart to help. Probably not very helpful, by my $0.02. Phil