[luau] version question

[Keith]

* Charles Lockhart <lockhart at jeans.ifa.hawaii.edu> [19/09/2003 1404EDT]:
> 1. I'm primarily a Redhat user.  Every once in a while, I upgrade,
> usually about 3-6 months after a new release has come out.  And I have
> multiple machines, so I have the convenience of upgrading them one at
> a time, so while my primary machine is still running 7.3, I have a
> couple other machines that are running 9.  The problem I'm running
> into, is that for me, 9 seems really different to 7.3.  A lot of the
> tools I was used to using in 7.3 (like Xconfigurator or gnorpm for
> instance, I've had problems with the similar programs that come with

RH re-wrote many (all?) of their proprietary config tools.  The rpm
packages have names of the form redhat-config-*.  Try this at the shell
prompt:

	rpm -qa | grep ^redhat-config-

There will probably be qutie a few, unless somehow you didn't install
them.  

What you once knew as Xconfigurator is now redhat-config-xfree86.

> 8) aren't there in 9 (or maybe I'm just stupid and can't find them).
> Then there's the loss of functionality.  RH9 seems completely devoid
> of the ability to play mpeg files.  It kind of blew me away.  So how
> are you supposed to cope?  I'm really busy doing stuff.  It seems kind
> of unreasonable to force me to learn a bunch of new programs (some of
> which I like a lot less) just to upgrade everything.

You will have to learn a bunch of new programs, but only those programs
that are proprietary to RH.  If you cannot play mpegs you're simply
lacking the supporting libraries or end-user programs and have to
install the appropriate packages.  This is, of course, bearing in mind
that RH may've changed the names of said packages. :)

I honestly don't know what your system(s) could be lacking.  I
personally prefer my own distro, LFS style (www.linuxfromscratch.org),
because commercial distros can become a headache with one upgrade.  LFS
is a great learning experience, too, if sufficient time is available.

RH is respectable but I only see it at my job...

> 
> 2. Is there a way to do an install that would combine rh7.3 and rh9? 
> Preferably an easy way?  One of the things I like about 7.3 is that when 
> I do a full install, I have access to both gnome and kde apps.  I like 
> the kde desktop, but there are a lot of gnome programs I'd rather use. 
> And for a lot of stuff on RH9, there doesn't seem to be either.

It's generally not safe to overlap any two releases of a distro, no
matter how far or close the version numbers are to one another.  You
will run into dependency problems, application-specific versioning
problems, etc, etc, etc.  This is especially true for apps/libs/kitchen
sinks/ as large and *cough cough* bloated as KDE and gnome.  :-)

HTH,
krjw.
-- 
Keith R. John Warno                  [k r j w  at  optonline dot net]
x = (x != NULL) ? (x) : (NULL);
       -- *sigh*... freshmen...