Red Carpet available for FC2 -- please try it out

[D. D. Brierton]

James Wilcox, one of the Red Carpet hackers, just emailed me to let me
know that Ximian/Novell hope to officially ship Red Carpet for FC2 with
the next release, but in the meantime unofficial packages are available
here:

http://slightly.off.net/rc-fc2


ABOUT RED CARPET
================

Red Carpet is one of the premier package management systems. It has both
command line and GUI interfaces which allow one to painlessly manage
software installation, upgrades, and removal, taking care of
dependencies and conflicts. It allows you to add repositories in a very
simple way (no more editing yum.conf!), which you may choose to
subscribe to or not. For example, I am subscribed to the Fedora.us and
the Livna.org channels, and so Red Carpet informs me of updates
available in those channels. However, I have also added the channels
(although not subscribed to them) for most of the other repositories out
there, such as DAG, ATrpms, FreshRPMs, etc., and Red Carpet allows me to
search for packages from any of those channels.

I would highly recommend trying it out for those of you who have never
used it before. I would very much like to see this included in at least
Fedora Extras for FC3, although my own personal preference is for this
to be added to Fedora Core.


INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
=========================

Read the README:
http://slightly.off.net/rc-fc2/rcfc2/fedora-2-i386/__README.html

Then, download the following RPMs:
http://slightly.off.net/rc-fc2/rcfc2/fedora-2-i386/rcd-2.2.0.91-0.vv.0.1.i386.rpm
http://slightly.off.net/rc-fc2/rcfc2/fedora-2-i386/red-carpet-2.2.3-0.vv.0.1.i386.rpm
http://slightly.off.net/rc-fc2/rcfc2/fedora-2-i386/rug-2.2.0.90-0.vv.0.1.i386.rpm

rcd is the Red Carpet Daemon. red-carpet is the GUI client, and rug is
the command line client.

Install them by opening a terminal and issuing the following command in
the directory to which you downloaded the RPMs:

sudo rpm -Uvh rcd*.rpm red-carpet*.rpm rug*.rpm


SETUP AND CONFIGURATION
=======================

Installation of the rcd RPM automatically sets it to start in runlevels
2, 3, 4, and 5:

sudo /sbin/chkconfig --list rcd
rcd             0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

However, installation does not automatically start the daemon:

sudo /sbin/service rcd status
rcd is stopped

so start it up:

sudo /sbin/service rcd start
Starting rcd:                                              [  OK  ]

Channels can be added either via the command line:

sudo rug service-add <url>

or from the graphical interface:

System Tools -> Red Carpet -> Edit -> Services

As shipped, the rcd daemon is already subscribed to the
http://slightly.off.net/rc-fc2 service which provides channels for
ATrpms, DAG, Fedora Core, Fedora.us, Livna.org, etc. You may wish to add
the Ximian service http://red-carpet.ximian.com/ (which will give you a
Mono channel). More channels can be found at open-carpet.org -- read
their instructions here (the URL below is a web page, not a Red Carpet
service!):

http://www.open-carpet.org/

Adding a service does not automatically subscribe you to the channels
that service provides you. To subscribe, in the graphical interface
either click the button on the toolbar that looks like a radar dish, or
do Edit -> Channel Subscriptions. As with any tool which gives you
access to multiple repositories, do NOT subscribe to all of them or YOU
WILL GET CONFLICTS AND A BROKEN SYSTEM! Instead, subscribe to the Fedora
Core 2 channels, the rpm.livna.org channels, and otherwise use the
"Available Software" and "Search" tabs to selectively install software
from other channels.

Best, Darren


-- 
=====================================================================
D. D. Brierton            darren at dzr-web.com          www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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