On Tuesday 01 April 2003 12:19, Speaker to Vegetables wrote: > Sorry, Austin, but in practice, installing an RPM intended for one > distribution on another distribution, is not particularly likely to > work. It may refuse to install unless you "force" it. It may install > and destabilize your system. I find it much easier and safer to install > from source tarballs than to install a "foreign" RPM. In theory an RPM And I find it much easier and safer to find the source RPM to that foreign RPM, try rpm --rebuild, and if that doesn't work, make the couple of lines of necessary changes in the spec file and stick the resulting now-Mandrake-specific RPM out on my website for anyone to use. Then if it turns out I don't want it anymore, I'm not stuck looking for needles in the haystack that is my filesystem when I want to uninstall it, nor do I have to worry about it stomping some other application's files as has been known to happen. I'm not ashamed of being a usability nazi. I won't be satisfied until Linux is easier to use for non-geeks and easier to manage in large quantities than both Mac and Windows, and I'm doing what little I can to help that along. I don't think it's any coincidence that all these usable audio apps started appearing once the Linux desktops started maturing, and I doubt the trend is going to reverse. Rob
