new to Linux

[Christofer C. Bell]

On Fri, 26 May 2000, Jason Fruge wrote:

> I am taking this as a flame, if you knew linux well, 80% of your
> installs would be from source. im looking forward to meeting you at
> linuxfest.

Se la vie. :-)

Sure, I'll be there and I'll be willing to answer any RPM questions you
have.  I'll be the short guy with short hair and a goatee, probably
wearing a LinuxCare t-shirt or a Red Hat button-up shirt.

Like I said, I've been using RPM based installs for about 4 years now and
I know the command pretty well.  I've been using Linux in general since
late 1994 (started with Slackware 2.0, kernel 1.1.59), and I've also used
NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/sparc extensively as well as FreeBSD.  In terms of
commercial Unix I've admined IRIX, Solaris, DG-UX, and SCO.  I've used
OSF/1, Digital UNIX (yes, they are slightly different), Ultrix, and HP-UX.

I still get paid pretty well to admin some clustered IRIX and Solaris
machines for a largish long distance company.  Hell, this is all
dickwaving, but I don't like being told I'm incompetent. :-)

I quit doing source installs when I didn't have to when I started to enjoy
a benefit of package management that source installs don't give you,
namely dependancy checking.  I do build my own RPMs on occasion,
too.  Another benefit of RPMs (and I would assume deb as well) is
intrustion detection.  Do an rpm -Va on your machine sometime.  You'll
instantly see the benfit of using this command right after you've been
cracked.  Heh.
  
There is a utility that gives you pseudo-package management for source
tarballs the name of which escapes me at the moment.  What is does is
construct a trees under /usr/local that are named /usr/local/software-name
and then manages symlinks under /usr/local/bin,lib, and so on so you can
uninstall the packages later more easily or list what software you have
installed via that method.  It doesn't interoperate with RPM, though, so
you still don't get the benefit of dependancy checking.  

There is also a utility called yasop that will beuild binary RPMs from
source tarballs for you, too.

And yeah, I know Linux pretty well.  I'm just selective about whom I share
that knowledge with. :-)

-- 
Chris