What is the current best choice for RPM repositories for FC8? I've so far added only the Planet CCRMA repository, which seems to be working OK. I'd like to add repositories with more multimedia applications, cinelerra, kino, dvdstyler, etc.

When I last upgraded, to FC4, I just added lots of repositories, and then later on read that I wasn't supposed to combine repository X and Y.

DAG, Dries, and Sasou seem to have combined their repositories into RPMForge. But Livna has a lot of the applications I want. Searching here I found a thread from 2005 saying that livna can cause conflicts with other repos. Is that still the case?

What would people recommend?

Strange, I don't seem to find information about RPMForge, DAG, etc., for distros later than FC5. While livna appears to be live. Is RPMForge dead?

You need to use the livna repos, if you start mixing repos you will run into all kinds of dependency errors.


What applications were you looking for I can post some of the repos...

You can install Livna and leave either it or PlanetCCRMA disabled to avoid conflicts. You can use as many repos as you want. If you install Livna, for example, leave it disabled and if you need something from there enable it on the yum command line, yum --enablerepo=livna install fancypackage. To disable Livna, edit /etc/yum.repos.d/livna.repo. There's a line that says enabled=1 near the top of the file. Change it to enabled=0. Leaving it disabled by default will avoid conflicts with other repos.

Thanks. I still don't understand which repos to use. I enabled livna just to install xmms-mp3 and xmms-faac. Then I removed the livna repo file.

Mainly I'd like video editing software. Kino, cinelerra, and kdenlive. Mplayer, ffmpeg, some x264 stuff. I'd prefer to use yum for these, but might have to fall back to installing from source.

RPMForge would look like the better option, but I cannot work out what on earth is going on with that repo. I asked a question on the RPMForge users list, which wasn't answered. I found others had asked similar questions which went unanswered. So I'm absolutely stumped as to what they are up to.

I spend most of my 'forum time' at Fedora Forum. Seems like most people there, myself included, use the Livna repo combined with the ones that are installed by default. That's not to say that they don't use others at all but Livna seems like the popular choice and it's usually pretty well kept up to date. I'm using Livna, Adobe and compiz-fusion, and all are enabled by default. Left that way there aren't many dependency problems. I have, in the past, installed FreshRPMS but I always leave that disabled because of potential conflicts between it and Livna. If I want a package that only FreshRPMS has I enable it at the command line. I've never used RPMForge so I can't say anything about it's merit. If I wanted to add that one I'd do the same thing, disable it buy default. It's all really very simple. You just need to be careful with your choices and use a little fore thought.

Edit: I'm checking out RPMForge now. Looks to me like there haven't been Fedora packages since Fedora Core 4

There is a move to merge the major 3rd party repositories into a single repo called RPM Fusion.

Some useful background here:

http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/1...on-for-fedora/

Very key is that the merged repo will include both Livna and Freshrpms that are currently incompatible, e.g. installing Cinelerra from Freshrpms will mess up your Livna Mplayer install, etc etc

It will be a significant positive for Fedora once RPM Fusion is up and running.

RPMFusion sounds like it will be a step forward when it happens.

In the meantime, this is a fresh install, and I can start over again. So I'll enable livna and see how far I get.

I presume that if I need to change to an incompatible repo, I can probably install rpms over the top of the livna ones using various "force" options.

If you do consider installing from other repositories, make sure that you have yum-protect-base installed. Personally, after some bad experiences, I now use livna only and whatever they do not have I install from source.