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Originally Posted by Charlie Spencer
First, I appreciate your taking the time to respond.
I've got FC5 on order but I had RH9 lying around from an attempt to learn Linux a few years ago. I'm assuming the knowledge I gain at the command line with this distro will apply equally to new distros. That's why I'm playing with rpm.
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Yes the commands are basically the same, but if you want to learn some more about rpm type 'man rpm' minus the single quotemarks in the console or xterm session.
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But I can't figure out why the un-tarred install runs but the attempt to install with rpm crashes. I assume the necessary dependencies are there; wouldn't the un-tarred install crash if they weren't? Why can't rpm find them? I don't know what browser comes in FC5, but I assume I'll have to go through this again to get FF installed. I'm trying to understand why doing it "wrong" works but doing it through the package manager doesn't.
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Well to start with the version of rpm that came with RHL9 is not the best tool to use to solve dependency issues, that why both apt and yum have been ported to the Red Hat Family.
Many times for various reasons when the binary rpms are created the creator(s) want to make sure you have all the needed libs for something to work right and sometimes they go a bit overboard, as in the case for firefox. You can build your own rpm for firefox-1.5.0.4 if you want, I tell you how at the end of this, but first bring the RHL9 current by visiting Fedora Legacy.
The firefox installation from the tar file only requires libstdc++.so.5 which part of the standard installation.
FC5 comes with a version of firefox and the current version is;
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu...2.fc5.i386.rpm
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I thought apt was for Debian-based distros. What's yum, and should I worry about either of them when FC5 arrives? And will I be able to install either, given my rpm problems with FF?
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Yes apt was for (just) Debian-based disros, but has been ported to other distors now. Yum is short for Yellow dog Updater, Modified and has a web page to explain itself, this has been ported also. In fact the Fedora Core family makes use of this for updating rpm packages now.
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/yum/en/
OK, as promised here's howto create your own firefox-1.5.0.4 rpm file;
You already have the firefox-1.5.0.4 tar file so you need to visit;
http://www.fedoranews.org/tchung/firefox/1.5.0.1/
and download all three files. The spec file goes in /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
The other two and the firefox tar file goes in /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES
The firefox.spec file needs a little editing, just enough to relfect the firefox version change. Any text can used to make and save this change. If not already installed install the rpm-build-4.2-0.69.i386.rpm (as root of course). When ready type something like; rpmbuild -bb firefox.spec
Please check the rpmbuild command, I'm not 100% sure this is the right command for RHL9, as it has been a long time since I have used RHL9.
FYI: If you choose to install either apt or yum then installing rpm packages in many cases be comes as simple as, for example;
yum -y install rpm-build
apt install rpm-build