This feels a little humiliating but...

I'm using Fedora Core 8 and this apparently ships with GCC 4.1. I want to upgrade to the latest 4.2 version, as some software I've got apparently requires it. So, three questions really...

1. How to find GCC 4.2 as a package that I can install easily?
2. Is there a good tutorial on 'yum' or 'apt' or whatever it is? I gather its similar to RPM, but seems to look at online repositories from the command-line for software rather than downloading RPM files manually off the web. If possible, something that explains how to 'scan' for certain software versions that might be available.
3. Newbie's way out: Can I get GNOME to 'force' a scan for upgraded packages. At the moment, it just occasionally finds new updates to install somehow.

I get the feeling if I can get my head around the common package managers, Linux software will be much easier to obtain. I already know how to search/install/uninstall RPM files that I've downloaded from the web, but thats about it.

Thanks.

2. a) in the terminal you can type: man yum
b) in google type: yum tutorial
3. you can't force anything, if automatic updates are turned on, then the moment a more recent package gets to repositories, your software updater will update it, you can't force to update something that doesn't have a more recent version, if that's what you meant.

1. I don't know much about fedora repositories, possibly you'd have to download it from the internet, just do some google search.

hth

arschi


Replacing the version of GCC that a particular version of linux is using is quite difficult. The problem is this: the entire system is built around that particular GCC versions libs. So if you replace the GCC version you (essentially) have to replace anything that relies on those libs (basically the entire system). What app are you trying to build that requires 4.2 (this will be an extremely rare instance as 4.1 has not been out very long (a year?)?

The easiest way to look for software (that you do not know the name of) is to install yumex. It is a graphical front end for yum. (yum install yummex) It should show up under Applications->System Tools->Yum Extender. If you know the name of the package:
or to update an installed package:
For a general system update:

If Fedora has not created an RPM for GCC 4.2 then you are unlikely to find one. You would have to download the source for gcc 4.2 and compile it yourself. You would have to find out if any of gcc's dependencies change from 4.1 and 4.2 and compile any dependency which has changed. You would want to compile gcc 4.2 into a different directory than gcc 4.1 so that you can run either one.

You have your terminology confused. RPM is a collection of ideas that includes a package format and some command line programs to manage packages built on the RPM format. yum is a higher level package manager built on top of RPM. yum will look at online repositories and select the combination of packages that you need, download them, and install them. Documentation includes the man pages:

man yum

man rpm

You can probably find a tutorial with Google.

There is a completely different package manager based on Debian. The packages are called deb packages. apt is a command line program used to manage deb packages. The GUI version of apt is called synaptic. Fedora does not use the deb system.

GNOME is a desktop manager. It has nothing to do with rpm or deb. You can use anacron to periodically schedule an update scan, say once a week. Work on creating a script which has yum do the scan, download, and update to your satisfaction then tell anacron to schedule your yum script to run periodically.

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Steve Stites