PCLinuxOS and trouble with Synaptic
 

I really do like PCLinuxOS however I ran into some problems with synaptic. when I select new repositories, they are detected, repository lists and the package list gets updated all fine and good. But that happens only once for me. After that I can select/unselect as many repositories as I want, nothing gets updated and I only find installed packages in my package list. It doesn't even bother to download the repo/package infos and I don't find any new packages and the problem persists even after rebooting the entire system. What's going on there? Is that a bug within Synaptic? There is also an issue with some repos that work one time then don't work the next. Can anyone help me solve this puzzle? cuz I'm very.. um.. puzzled now.

You really only need:

I had some trouble with repositories for Synaptic on PCLOS a while back. I can't say that I ever resolved it. The only repository that I'm using now is the one that Nexus has listed. I've been using that one for months without problems.

I don't think there's a bug in Synaptic because my Kubuntu machines don't have any problems with Synaptic or anything else. They're pretty excellent as far as operating systems are concerned. Super fast compared to PCLOS on very similar hardware. In fact the PCLOS has the faster hardware and the Kubuntu screams while PCLOS slogs along.

Nevertheless, neither Nexus nor I answered your question. Sorry about that. Try using that repo listed in Nexus' post as your only active repo.

well I pretty much resolved the problem. It seems to make a big difference to wether or not I select a the vendor (it works well without it) now there's something that confuses me a bit here: Now I know that RPM are normal RPM packages and RPM-SRC means RPM source packages but what the heck does RPM-SRC-DIR do for me other than screwing up the repo I'm using and what a big difference does it make wether or not I select a vendor (eg PCLinuxOS)

PS: It does appears to be beneficial to have multiple repos selected since my package list appears to have increased dramatically in numbers. However I'm still missing some favorite games that I used to find in other distro's repos, such as astromenace, glaxxium, etc..

Also - and I might put that into a seperate thread - I'm having great trouble playing mp3 files. NONE of the players seem to be able to play them, even with LAME installed and I even run into problems converting wav files into mp3's which means that it looks like it's working but the output are unusuable absurdly small mp3 files. Am I missing something there?