i have SuSE on my laptop and so far, my experience is terrible.

i want to type up some latex but SuSE 8.2 did not install latex. the online updater YOU doesn't have it either. one solution is to download all the latex rpms and install them. but dependency issues make this possible.

apt-get seems to be the only solution. but even installing apt, apt-server, apt4rpm is not possible without doing a complete upgrade of basically the entire system. apt depends on rpm 4.0 but SuSE comes with rpm 3.0 and perlXML which must have a 10^9 dependencies.

anyone have suggestions about doing this easily? i've notice that their is not SuSE forum in linuxquestions.org. is this just a coincidence? if i get no responses, then i may revert to a Redhat + apt-get setup. _

I have only spent a day or two using SUSE, but if you can download the rpm separately then I think YOU should be able to pick it up from there. Other than that, why don't you want to upgrade your other packages?

i don't understand why SuSE is package with old versions of openssl and openssh. it makes me unhappy that my system is vulnerable immediately upon boot up. when i try to install the most recent version of gaim, a list of missing dependencies is displayed which makes me unhappy because kopete simply confuses me. i write up my homework in latex but when i execute texi2dvi iget an error that tells me to install some packages. i have been spoiled by apt. i am unwilling to spend a few minutes tracking down rpm's knowing that these packages may very well have their own missing dependencies. i really don't like SuSE.

of course, SuSE might be using some other non-rpm system that i don't understand. in that case, i'm just an incompentent SuSE user which btw, i realize and have responded by posting a message on linuxquestions.

i'm going to fedora and lend a hand in development (well, to the best of my ability).

I didn't mean to imply anything negative. I appoligize if it was taken that way.

I didn't understand why you don't want to upgrade other packages.

I could be wrong here, but you may only need the apt and libapt rpms to use apt. This may help get rid of the need to upgrade.

I did notice that the apt repositories for SUSE did have two versions of KDE. I think the "suse-people" section had KDE 3.1.92. You may try only "base" in your sources.list file.

I installed fedora and it looks good. I like that you can now use yum and supposidly apt repositories w/ Up2Date. The yum reposistories worked well for me. It looks like a promissing distro, but not quite there to pull me away from debian and mandrake.

on SuSE, installing the rpms of apt and libapt returns a list of failed dependencies with rpm. i really don't like this dependency-mess and have given up because i am a busy student.

i'm impressed that schaez has installations of all major linux distros (each on a separate computer?). there are quite a few options now but which do you think is most promising (not necessarily good now but has potential)? i like APT a lot but i haven't played with YUM... i'm afraid conflicts between the two may brick my machine. what are your preferences between the two?

I been switching back and forth between mainly Mandrake and Debian. I've been using Debain more and more. I started using Linux 5-6 months ago and instead of reinstalling it all the time to try different distro's I put them on different partitions. I use Grub for the boot manager.

Right now I have Mandrake, Debian, and Fedora installed. I liked SUSE, but decided against it since it didn't seem to have a strong community backing. I think Fedora is very promising. I'd like to see more outside/contrib repositories.

I like apt better than yum. It's faster and I know all the commands. But it seams the emphasis is on yum more than apt. You should be able to use either just not at the same time. I've heard that it is easier to setup a yum repository though.