Hi thar, I just downloaded apt-get in Fedora. Cool program, however I'm downloading from a server that has little to nothing on it. How can I add places to download from?

Take a look at << www.fedoratracker.org/ >>.

I'm a Linux newb so I actually have no idea what to do with that.

I assumed that you knew a bit about it since you had installed apt rather than using the pre-installed yum.

Red Hat, and its derivatives, use .RPM packages. A package contains the files the software needs. Some packages depend on other packages, and won't install unless the dependencies are satisfied. This can lead to "dependency hell" if a package depends on a number of others, because you would need to download and install the dependencies, which might have their own dependencies.

That's why they came up with apt and yum. They are both systems that have repositories that contain sets of packages. When you use either, it reads the list of available packages, and downloads and installs whatever you want, and all its dependencies. Fedora chose yum as the official package manager, but people also packaged apt for it.

The site I mentioned in my previous post collects repos from all over. You can use it to create an /etc/apt/sources.list or an /etc/yum.conf . Those are the files that keep the list of repos your system will check when you run either apt or yum.

Read more about apt at << http://freshrpms.net/apt/ >>.
And, yum at << http://www.linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/ >>.

Yeah I got that much. I was just wondering how to (if at all) get files from different places, in an effort to get more diverse files.

'apt-get' is most likely hard coded to access the site you are downloading from.

Read the manuals for 'wget' and 'ncftp' and 'ftp'.
And your browser.

Go to sourceforge, freshmeat.

Decide what kind of program you want and search for it with google.

Best way to find other repositories for apt is to google "apt [your distro name] repository" or "apt [distro] sources.list"

Find examples of what other people put in their sources.list, or try to find a repository nearest to you for the faster downloads of your software.

The file /etc/apt/sources.list is the list of the http or ftp sites that apt will pull your packages from. You'll have to modify it as root, but just use vi or any other text editor to change it. Good luck. Once you get APT running right, you'll never go back. Just as a caveat, once you have found a good repository, don't switch to another. Repositories will vary on what they have and how often they are updated. If you suddenly decide to switch to a different ftp or http repository to download your packages from, your certain to run into "dependency hell". Also, if your using APT, do not use yum or up2date. Let APT do all the upgrading you need. You can use the command apt-get upgrade to get all the upgrades you need, or apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade your entire distribution's OS. Never do a apt-get dist-upgrade while running inside a GUI like X/KDE/Gnome. I hope that helps.

Not really a good idea... If you are accessing different repos maintained by different people with different packages, you could run into trouble with dependencies... Repo A has foo-3.42 and its dependency bar-7.89, but Repo B has bar-8.00. If you update, bar-8.00 might not work with foo-3.42.

But, if you want to, all you have to do is add more repos into your apt sources.list or yum.conf.