On Tue, 2007-02-06 at 17:51 +0000, Robin Menneer wrote: > > This is news indeed. Having read the wranglings between the > protagonists of the various versions of Linux, I had gained the > impression that software was exclusive to the basis sprecification.
It's true to say that often a "package" will work on one distribution and not another, however there are some overlaps. Many .deb packages will work on many of the debian based distributions with little or no modification. Indeed the "upstream" source code (which is invariably free) can usually be compiled manually to run on any distribution at all. For example the Kernel is a prime example of that. The kernel you use under redhat or fedora is essentially the same as the kernel compiled under debian or ubuntu. Ok, each distribution may slighly tweak the vanilla kernel by adding their own patches or enhancements, but to all intents and purposes its the same product, just packaged differently. > Does it mean that it's all complatible although possibly less > efficient = slower ? Not sure about that. If you took a very low spec machine and ran GNOME with KDE applications on top you would of course get the memory hit of having both GNOME and KDE libs in memory at once. How much of a hit I couldnt say, I am fortunate enough to not be in that situation. > Presumably the extra libraries load themselves automatically with the > package being acquirered. > Yes. I run GNOME here, see what happens when I try to install digikam (a KDE app):- [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ sudo apt-get install digikam Password: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: bochsbios comerr-dev libqt4-qt3support libkrb5-dev libsqlite0-dev libssl-dev vgabios libqt4-sql libpq-dev libkadm55 Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them. The following extra packages will be installed: kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a libarts1c2a libavahi-qt3-1 libexiv2-0.12 libkipi0 Suggested packages: digikam-doc fam Recommended packages: digikamimageplugins kipi-plugins kdeprint konqueror perl-suid libarts1-akode exiv2 The following NEW packages will be installed: digikam kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a libarts1c2a libavahi-qt3-1 libexiv2-0.12 libkipi0 0 upgraded, 7 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded. Need to get 23.3MB of archives. After unpacking 77.5MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Note that digikam requires various extra kde packages "kdelibs-data", "kdelibs4c2a" and so on. Of course if you did the same - installed something like gnome-baker on KDE you'd see the same effect in reverse - it would want the gnome libs. Cheers, Al.
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