Advice on package conflicts?
 

Hi there,

I'm pretty new to Linux (using SuSE 9.3)but have enjoyed playing around with it for a few weeks. However, there's something that continues to frustrate me, and I was wondering if people could give me any general advice on how to deal with it.

I've managed to install a few new applications, mostly using RPMs, but also by building from source in a couple of cases. But so often, I get told (eg. in the Suse RPM manager Yast) that program A requires package B version 1.02. I download this, only to find that loads of other programs on my system rely on package B version 1.01 and that I'll have to uninstall them first!

This seems a bit silly, and as I said, it's happened to me quite a few times in the last week or so. Is there any general way around this? I mean, if two packages require different versions of some library, can you install both versions of the library at once? Or do you just have to bite the bullet and never install any packages that conflict with each other?

Any advice much appreciated. Hope it's not a stupid question.

Mike

Fedora , Debian and similar distributions have "yum" and "apt" repositories which try to maintain upto date packages so that dependencies are also upto date. Check if Suse has some repositories like that.