[rhn-users] firefox and yum

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi Paula,

Paula J. Lindsay wrote:
> Hi everyone, I hope you can help me with this silly problem.  I'm
> working on a RHE 3 machine and I am trying to install yum
> so I can yum down firefox.  Well, when I try to install yum (via rpm) 
> there are too many dependencies/conflicts and the install
> fails. 

Where are you getting the yum RPM for RHEL 3 from? Are you sure the RPM
you are using was built for RHEL 3?

RHEL 3's default and Red Hat supported package update system is a
program called 'up2date'. Do you have a specific reason that you would
like to use yum instead of up2date on RHEL 3?

> I finally gave up and downloaded a firefox package and I can't
> install that either.  I get this message:
> 
> (firefox-bin:1120): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:

Where are you receiving this message? This doesn't seem to be a message
that RPM, yum, or up2date would output. See, it says "firefox-bin" so it
looks like an error message given by running firefox, which means
firefox would have to have been successfully installed.

How are you starting up firefox when you try to run it? My first guess
would be that maybe you've ssh'ed into a machine that has firefox
installed and you are typing 'firefox' at the prompt, but because you
are ssh'ed in it can't display the firefox window on your remote
machine. (If you are connecting from a remote Linux machine you can try
ssh -Y <hostname goes here> and then running firefox remotely and it
should pop up.)

> I am getting so frustrated because these were such simple tasks and I am
> just spinning my wheels.  Why is it so hard to install
> these two programs. 

It appears you successfully installed firefox. Yum, I am not sure what
the whole story is with that - why are trying to install it on a RHEL 3
machine? Is the RPM you are using built for RHEL 3?

> Why doesn't the rpm that I download already have
> the libs and python that is needed. 

Necessarily, programs like firefox and yum rely on versions of libraries
that are external to them. If every program contained the code for every
other program and library it required, you would have many duplicate
copies of the same set of libraries and programs installed on your
machine, not only wasting your harddrive space but also leaving your
machine vulnerable to security bugs as some programs' copies of a
particular library may be very out-of-date.

It is also important that the RPMs installed on your system are built
for the version of RHEL that you are using. If you try to install a yum
package that was built for RHEL 5 on a RHEL 3 machine, for example, it
will likely never install because it will require versions of libraries
and other packages that are not and likely will never be available in
RHEL 3. One of the main differences between RHEL 3 and RHEL 5, for
example, is the very package set and the manifest of package versions
available in each.

RPMs are not really meant to be installed by hand. We have package
management programs such as yum and up2date in RHEL and apt in Debian in
order to manage this 'dependency hell' for you. You should not have to
resolve these dependencies by hand. The following video/article does
talk a bit about this:
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/09/20/the-next-horizon-how-red-hat-used-yum-to-overcome-rpm-dependency-hell/

If you would have installed firefox by running 'up2date -i firefox' you
would not have had to deal with any of this, if your goal was to just
install firefox.

> I can't even
> google the problem because I always end up where I downloaded the
> program in the first place.  Any help would be
> dearly appreciated.  And, thanks in advance.

In the future you may have some luck with http://kbase.redhat.com/. Or
of course you can feel free to ask here!

Does this make any more sense now?

~m