Some questions about Fedora

[Richi Plana]

On Thu, 2007-09-20 at 16:14 +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:

> Mmmh, If I'm a fedora user, and need a package for something that isn't
> in those 8232 binary packages, what should I do? Install from sources?
> Or is there some sort of organized way to look for RPMs in unofficial
> repositories? (I head of rpmfind, but I'm not sure it's what I think)

There are third-party yum repositories. For various stuff (including
multimedia applications, codecs, mythtv, asterisk, games) there's ATRPMS
(http://www.atrpms.net/) and RPMFusion (http://rpmfusion.org/) (which is
going to be a merging of 3rd-party repositories Dribble, Livna and
FreshRPMS (which, I think, has Dag Wiers packages, as well)). Java
packages for Fedora can be had from JPackage (http://www.jpackage.org/).

There are several individual companies with their own repositories for
Fedora like Google and Adobe.

With a properly configured yum system (and some cooperation between some
3rd-party repos), all of these packages can be seamlessly and
effortlessly be downloaded and installed on Fedora.

You can also install from sources. Anyone can do the "./configure; make;
make install" routine. Though, of course, those won't be managed by the
package manager. Personally, if I can't find a repository with an RPM
package for software I want installed, I write my own spec file (with
the tools provided in the rpmdevtools package) and rpmbuild my own.

RPMFind is a manual way of finding RPM packages and you're not
guaranteed that the RPM you'll find will integrate well on Fedora
systems.
--

Richi Plana