[CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

Fri Sep 17 19:38:20 UTC 2010
Keith Roberts <keith at karsites.net>

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:

> To: centos at centos.org
> From: Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] looking for cool,
>     post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system
> 
> On 9/17/2010 1:21 PM, Keith Roberts wrote:
>>
>>>> How to download, md5sum check, unpack, configure and
>>>> compile a GPL *.tar.gz package.
>>>>
>>>> As SysAdmin that's something they will need to do sooner or
>>>> later :)
>>>
>>> But it's much more important to know all the reasons *not* to do that
>>> except as a last resort.  Reasons that someone who has had to maintain
>>> and update such things for decades will know that won't occur to an
>>> inexperienced beginner.  You can summarize by saying "yum update is a
>>> lot easier".
>>
>> Of course.
>>
>> But what if they want/need to install a package that is not
>> available in any of the repos? Maybe even just for
>> testing purposes?
>
> Yes, that's where the 'last resort' comes in...  But you are right, you
> should also know how to build things that live in /usr/local or under
> your home directory.  Sometimes there are special purpose needs for
> things that don't exist as rpms yet or you need concurrent access to
> different versions.  And I'm sure someone will add that you should also
> know how to build your own rpm if I don't mention it, but that can be
> non-trivial compared to just staying out of the way of the
> system-managed space.

That's almost getting into repository management. I've 
looked at this rpm guide:

http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm-snapshot/

I found this very helpfull in understanding how to use RPM, 
and it also goes into details about creating rpm packages.

Regards,

Keith

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