Upgrade a Distro

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Wed Jul 11 15:59:19 PDT 2001


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jesse Manibusan" <jessmani at yahoo.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 8:17 AM
Subject: [luau] Re: Upgrade a Distro


> I have a related question:
>
> When installing a new dist., how do you know what packages are required
for
> the applications you want to install?  For example, if you wanted to have
> PERL, SSH and say sendmail running on your server, how do you know which
> packages to install and which to ignore?  Is there some kind of list that
> shows what each application needs to run properly?

What you are describing is exactly the reason behind the RPM and DEB
packaging systems.  For the most part it does it does the job well.
Unfortunately most people harbor bad feelings toward RPM due to "broken
dependencies", while DEB has had that problem fixed for a very long time.
Debian's apt-get makes it very easy to install anything you want.  You
simply type the command, and it calculates dependencies and downloads all
other needed packages too.

With Red Hat 6.2 through 7.1, you can use the Red Hat Network and up2date
tools to the same effect.  After you created your RHN account, you can use
up2date like "up2date openssh-server"  And it would also download all
packages like openssh, openssl, and some libgzip package if you don't
already have them installed.

The only drawback of RHN is that it is not free.  You only get one free
subscription, and you gotta pay the monthly subscription for additional
machines.  This is actually very handy and well worth the low cost for sites
with many Red Hat servers because of the amount of time it saves the
administrators, along with the enterprise level support that many of those
sites need.  (They would never accept Debian Linux because of its lack of
support, although this may change with Libranet, Progeny and IBM supporting
Debian.)

Mandrake now has a similar apt-like system called urpmi.  You can read a
recent Slashdot article that compares Debian's apt-get to Mandrake urpmi
here:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/28/0611240&mode=thread

Some guys have also been adapting apt for RPM.  I don't know who uses it
yet, but it will be a very promising development when it becomes mainstream.

Ximian's Red Carpet promised similar capabilities, but I have never seen it
actually work well.

>
> Also, does anyone have any recommendation on where to get cheap
distribution
> CD's of BSD and Linux?  I checked linuxmall but the website has some kind
of
> error database error on it and I don't know any other trustworthy vendors
> out there.

http://www.lsl.com
I bought from these guys a few times. Very fast, and they even mailed me
CD's again for free when they shipped the wrong CD's. They also have
unofficial updated versions of several Linux distributions, very convenient.



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