[Cialug] CentOS Yum error

[Daniel A. Ramaley]

On Tuesday August 12 2008 14:57, David Champion wrote:
>That's one of the things I really like about Mandriva... between the
>main, contrib, and plf sources, I can get most all of the packages I
> need.

I've not used Mandriva. (Was that formerly Mandrake? I did use Mandrake 
PPC on my old Apple G3 laptop for awhile several years ago.) But, one 
of the big reasons i migrated to Debian several years back was the 
package manager. Coming from Red Hat, it was a bit of a learning curve. 
But the sheer number of packages available means i rarely need to 
compile something on my own and it was well worth it. My home machine 
(running Debian Testing, but with Unstable repositories also listed in 
the apt.source file) lists over 24000 packages available for install. I 
don't want to know how big a "full" installation would be, nor how long 
it would take to download and unpack all that stuff...

I think at the time i switched away from Red Hat that package management 
on RPM systems was either still a bit primitive, or else i'd simply not 
learned the more advanced utilities. I remember lots of "dependency 
hell" type problems on Red Hat that i've not experienced on Debian. I 
think the problems i had are not as common on more modern RPM-based 
systems though (including Red Hat itself).


On an unrelated note, last week i was in Japan. On the flight back i 
learned that Northwest runs Linux on their in-flight entertainment 
system. They rebooted it at the beginning of the flight and on all the 
screens the Linux boot process showed for awhile with Tux, followed by 
the X-windows grey screen with black "X" cursor before their own 
software loaded. Judging by how slow the boot-up was, i don't think 
they were running it on cutting-edge hardware. But just for playing 
movies and showing maps of the plane and statistics about the flight 
shouldn't take much. I was happy to see Linux used there though.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
+1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA