Hal -- I was hoping you'd get feedback from some RPM user who could
answer your questions directly. As you may recall, I'm exclusively a
Debian user these days. But I think I may be able to help with some of
your confusion. And since I gather that Edgar's off-list reply didn't
cover everything you were looking for, I'll give it a try below.
Hal MacArgle wrote:
On 04-06, SOTL wrote:
On Wednesday 05 April 2006 11:10 am, Hal MacArgle wrote:
Greetings: A Slackware junkie all my Linux life, I'm just now
"playing" with other distributions that use RPM..
At first I thought, piece of cake, invoking rpm -i package.rpm;
slick..
That didn't last, when I tried installing a package that didn't play
ball, and opened Pandora's box of queries.. Man rpm shed some light,
what I understood, so I pulled a book I had covering Red Hat 6.2 -
rather old, but just maybe??
rpm -i package.rpm - returns "warning: package.rpm: V3 DSA signature:
NOKEY, key ID [octet of characters]
error: Failed dependencies: (with a list of no less than 15 of them
reporting the exact library needed...)
First off, I didn't know what V3 DSA meant,
This is probably a digial signature of some sort,intended to prevent
package spoofing. About a year ago, Debian added digital authentication
to its package sites, and as a result, I routinely have to override it
when installing or upgrading packages from unofficial Debian archives.
Since you say you were trying to install a package that is not part of
the offifial distro you were working with, you most likely ran into
something similar that the RPMers are doing now.
but the missing
dependencies are fairly normal these days.. I had some work ahead of
me but the RedHat book said to use rpm -q --redhatprovides
<library.so.X> and it would list the base package needed.. This is
not RedHat, of course, but there is a --provides flag that didn't
return anything except that the package was missing.. I tried that
entering a library that's either in /lib or /usr/lib, and it returned
"Package not installed." I'm presuming this has been changed for, at
least, libraries.. Or--is it the NOKEY thingy?? Stumped!!
BTW the subject package was fetched from rpm.pbone.net, whereas the
rpm's installed previous to that were ones in the SuSE distribution
package.. That has to have a lot to do with it, IMHO... <grin>
Is there a tutorial that explains this better than the man?? TIA.
If I recall correctly RPM stands for Red Hat Package Manager which I believe
is uses by Fedora/Redhat and FreeMandriva/Mandriva/Mandrake.
True AFAIK; plus others including Slackware that has the rpm
program but warns us that it doesn't work with all apps... Open
Source keeps us on our toes, eh?? Could it be with SuSe that it means
something like Reliable Package Manager, instead of RedHat Package
Manager?? Stranger things have happened.. The study of acronyms is
another PhD dissertation..
Not sure on this but I believe that SuSE uses a different package system which
is not compatable with Red Hat's.
This is what I really needed to know.. "RPM" is not,
necessarily, "RPM"... Open Source again??
I am sure that Debian uses a different system which is also used by Ubuntu and
Kubuntu.
Yes; ".deb" and it too probably works with other
distributions unknown by me.. It's getting much more complicated than
when I first found Linux after years of Unix...
Quick history lesson: Pretty much all distros that are still around
derive from one of three origins:
1. Slackware really has no modern descendents, but it is the oldest
branch that's still active. I believe it still uses .tgz packages
natively. In a sense, I suppose it (or its anscestors, SLS, Yggdrasil,
and perhaps others I've forgotten) spawned everything else, but Red Hat
and Debian diverged so fundamentally from Slackware et al. ... for
example, abandoning its BSD-style init structure for a SysV structure
... that it's hard to see them as derived from Slackware, even beyond
the difference in package managers.
2. Red Hat spawned SuSE, Mandrake, Connectiva, and a ton of others,
identifiable by their use of the RPM package manager (which still stands
for RedHar Package Manager, as far as I know)/
3. Debian spawned Knoppix, Ubuntu, DSL, and a bunch of others,
identifiable by their use of the .deb packaging format and one or
another of the Debian package management systems (dpkg, apt, and the like).
That said, the fact that two distros use the same package manager does
NOT mean their packages are interchangeable. All distros have their own
quirks, in areas like distro-specific kernel patches, slight variation
in "what goes where" conventions (like /bin vs /usr/bin), customized
init scripts, vert distinctive installers, and probably more. Package
naming is not standardized either, so a package from one distro might
fail to find in a different distro a file it depends on because the
package name for the file is different.
Cross installing, even between two distros that use the same
package-management system, is generally considered an expert task. In
Debian, even installing across flavors (e.g., trying to install a
package from Unstable on a Stable or Testing system) is tricky.
These days, all good distros cross support one another's package
managers, either directly or using a "translator" application like
alien. But resolving dependencies remains messy.
If what you are doing is what I infer from your title that you are trying to
install RPM into a SuSE system then I do not believe even if there were no
issues with the package manager that it would work as Red Hat and SuSE do
things internally sufficiently different that the only package that I am
aware of that will run equally on both system is OpenOffice.org's Office
package which basically puts all libraries and all components into a separate
root directory with no integration. Since this is not the Linux/Unix way but
is the MS way which OO is emulating I do not believe that you will find any
other package that will install and run in a equivalent way.Thus I believe
that it may be best to find the correct SuSE package for installation. From
past experience not with SuSE but other distributions if you do not you are
simply asking for problems.
More or less, simply, I've been looking for a distribution
that supports streaming video including editing, etc, not that I want
the M$ route either.. It's obviously extremely complicated
Yeah, no kidding.
Pretty much any major distro will support video capture from a TV-tuner
card, probably with a version of mplayer/mencoder (though patent, DRM,
and/or licensing messiness may keep the relevant packages outside the
official distribution, as happens with Debian). If you want this sort of
capture with a pretty interface, look at MythTV, which is (to my eye)
best suited to the short-term time-shifting uses that TiVos are also
best at ... though some use it to do capture for long-term storage.
Editors come and go, and I've never found one I like as much as
VirtualDub, a freeware editor that is Windows only. There are several
around though ... the term you want to search on is "non-linear editor".
The Debian-Sid package archive currently lists a gstreamer plugin, kino,
and pitivi. There are probably others not in Debian.
"Streaming" is a pretty open-ended term, so I'm not exactly sure what
you want to achieve (getting video streams from the Internet? attaching
a host to your TV set and having it play video stored on a server
elsewhere on your LAN? multicasting a video stream across your LAN so
several locations in your home show the same show? putting a DVD in one
host and having it play back on another? something else?). Be more
specific here and I'll be happy to give you whatever more advice I can
(I've been using my Linux server as a TiVo-like backend for several
years now, but I don't have any significant experience with files
downloaded from streaming sites on the Internet).
so I'm
going to build on what I have already using Slackware 10.2, kernel
2.4.31... Skirting around to other distributions to make it "simple"
just hasn't happened.. My mind was definately made up when I tried
yet another .rpm package that needed 25 extra dependencies, most of
which I already had in either /lib or /usr/lib and I have no idea why
the package didn't find them... It's moot now... <grin>
As I said above, the problem with dependencies is probably variation in
package names.
Usually, if you need to install a package from the upstream provider,
rather than the distro itself, the provider will be fairly specific
about what distro/version a particular .rpm (or .deb) is designed to
work with. At least that's my experience with upstream .deb packages.
Color inside the lines and its a piece of cake; ignore posted
limitations at your own risk.
If the upstream provider doesn't have a package that matches your
distro, you typically have to install from source or from a .tgz (and
fix any real dependency issues by hand). Again, not really a newbie task
(yeah, I know you are no more a newbie than I am, Hal, but this *is* a
beginners' list).
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