Linux Newbie--- Identify versions
 

Hello ,

I am a newbie to Linux and I have fedor Linux installed in my machine. I was looking to download a mp3 player software and i find rpm's for various versions available. BUt none of them seem to use names like Suse or Mandrake or Redhat. Instead they have listings like this listed below.

* Linux x86 glibc 2.1 (RPM packages available)
* Linux x86 glibc 2.0 (RPM packages available)
* Linux x86 libc5

Unsupported platforms...
No support available, use at your own risks.

* Linux PPC / MkLinux (RPM packages available)
* Linux Alpha (RPM packages available)
* FreeBSD (with Linux emulation)
* Solaris SPARC
* Solaris x86
* Dec-Alpha OSF1 V4.0
* HP-UX
* IRIX
* BSD/OS
* NetBSD
* SCO OpenServer

1). Now, which of these descriptions correspond to Fedora Linux (IF ANY)
2). What is this x86 glibc or NetBSD.. Are these other flavours of Linux around like Mandrake and Redhat or are these something to do with the kernel ??

Regards ,
Pradhip.S

That's a lot of different things coming together for the wrong reasons. You're using Fedora so you probably have XMMS and Rhythmbox installed which are both fine mp3 players. glibc stuff on the other hand you won't need unless you're compiling stuff from source. glibc contains all the libraries (useful stuff) used by c programs. The x86 is what archetecture the package is for: x86 is probably what you use (most people do). Other examples there are Solaris SPARC (server based arch from Sun, the makers of Java) and HP-UX (from Hewlett Packard, not just printers!). NetBSD is a different operating system all together. You know about Windows and Linux, well, BSD is a cousin to Linux. It's a Unix derivative just like Linux, but different. Interestingly, Apple Mac OS X is BSD based. NetBSD is a distribution of BSD, along with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and a host of others. Hope this helps. :)

Simply put, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD are not Linux. Now on to the rest..

Linux x86 glibc 2.1
^ ^ ^
ok obvious translation = Intel type PC main C library

Ok I don't know if that helped or not?

Anyway on Fedora you probably have >= glibc 2.1 (2.2 or 2.3), so grab the Linux x86 glibc2.1 version, should work ok.