Hi, having another go at linux used mandrake quite allot and currently trying suse. My bigest gripe is software management . Now it's all well and good having built in package systems (mandrake, suse) but there are allot of programs that can only be built from source and tracking down the different dependcies can be a major pain. so when i type ./configure or make i want it to download anything it needs automatically.

on a slightly different issue im currently trying suse 9.1 personal which i like allot but it has installed fake compilers and installing them manually isn't changing anything. this appears to be a common problem. so is there a cure for this.

thx

Well, gentoo and debian, and actually a lot of your RPM distros can do this. You just need the right package manager. For gentoo and debian, these are built in. For your RPM distros you can use RPM's and the tool will be synaptics with a back end of apt, from freshrpms.net

I'd probably try uninstalling the 'faked' compilers first, cleaning the system of the packages, and then installing the real/correct ones. Also, don't forget to check SuSE's doc's for any info, and of course the SuSE distro forum.

Cool

See the link in my sig below for instructions for adding the Packman repository to YaST. As for dependencies, YaST will handle this for RPM installs (even from the command line, via the ncurses-based interface). What I normally do to resolve dependencies for compiled software is to find out what it needs, run YaST and search for them, install them, then return to compiling the software.

Packman sources will correct the lousy compilers and other "broken" packages on your system, as well as give the option to install KDE 3.3.