This is something that I've muddled through many times, but never had a good idea of what I was actually doing. If someone could give a good explanation of the ideas behind the actions, I would be very happy and thankful.
I just decided to attempt to "upgrade" Gimp on my machine (which I guess is just the same as installing from scratch). I'm running RH9, but I could only find an RPM for Fedora Core 1. I didn't think it was the right one for me, but I got it and tried it anyway, but was then faced with a long list of dependencies that need to be taken care of first. I've found some of them in tarballs, zipped in various formats, but now what? How do I get them into thier proper places, configured properly, and such
Any help would be appreciated. (I wouldn't mind seeing something like this at an UUG meeting, but I think I'm the only real newbie that occasionally attends (sorry, astronomy's not my thing)).
(typing fast, sorry no caps, bad grammar)
so basically redhat, mandrake, suse, most any distribution these days has some sort of central update mechanism, similar to windows update. The difference is, windows update only manages windows stuff since microsoft only has a license to distribute their stuff, nobody elses, blah blah blah. In the open source world redhat (and all the other distros, you use redhat so lets stick with that) can distribute all the software, OS, mozilla, gimp, openoffice, etc. In fact they all share components, hence the dependency problems you have. In short, if you are willing to stick with redhat's schedule and wait 'till they offer the official redhat 9 gimp update rpm then you can just use apt-get or yum or whatever rpm tool you want to download the new gimp and all the dependencies for you. Very easy. Unfortunately the newest redhat X version of say, the gimp, is usually not he newest version that you see on the gimp website. Even more unfortunate for you, redhat no longer supports redhat 9, so you can run apt-get update; apt-get upgrade forever and probably never see a new version of the gimp come down.
So how do you update one piece of software ahead of the distributions update cycle? If it's a simple app like maybe gaim, with no real dependency problems, then just grab the rpm from the gaim website and rpm -Uvh it. If it's something like the gimp, well, I've had some success compiling something like that from source and then just having the two versions installed, one the "official" rpm, the other from source. This doesn't always work so smoothly, in fact I just tried to update evolution that way on my redhat 9 box at work, and now it seems all of gnome is confused. I would guess that having two versions of the gimp installed won't be as bad as evolution, but you have been warned. If you try to go this route and need help on how to compile, get needed libraries, etc let us know. It's educational.
Bryan
_______________________________________________ newbies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/newbies
