JeevesBond — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:20:45 +0000

Quote: Are you certain you've got your source/repo lists configured fully?

Whooops, no. I was only looking at the xfce pages, re-read your post, thought there must be more to it and looked for this mysterious "repo" -- which I guessed was short for repository

SUSE has an extra package repo but it only serves patches, no extra software. Had a look around YaST in the software section and discovered where extra package locations can be added (not that I can remember where it is now - am at work on the Windoze box), then had a further nose around the openSUSE site, finally found: http://www.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories

Hurrah! Stuck a Packman mirror into YaST and I can indeed get xfce for SUSE 10.0. Only annoyance is that I'm going to have to re-install it using YaST - having used that binary installer, but hey-ho at least I've been enlightened.

Glad to hear you're using Linux a bit Tim!

Quote: which means that it might be able to handle .rpm (Fedora) or .deb (Debian) packages

Yeppers, YaST can handle .rpm for certain, not sure about .deb files though...

Abhishek Reddy — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 01:10:50 +0000

Wow, I didn't realise the install guide pointed to the SVN repo. Pretty silly of them if you ask me.

I'm surprised there isn't a package out for SuSE 10. Are you certain you've got your source/repo lists configured fully? Just guessing, though, as I've never used YaST. If there's absolutely no package in the repos then I've no doubt there will be one released soon.

As I recall, YaST has some overlap with Yum and/or Apt, which means that it might be able to handle .rpm (Fedora) or .deb (Debian) packages. Again unsure about YaST, but I know other package managers can handle certain source packages, but even those aren't vanilla - they do need to be packaged specially. Even Gentoo's Portage is like that.

timjpriebe — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:42:44 +0000

I'm a newbie as far as Yast and Suse goes, but I just installed Suse 9.3 on a computer at home, Jeeves, and I'm pretty sure that YaST cannot handle compiling and installing from source. I've just been downloading the Suse packages when available.

If I'm wrong, please, someone let me and Jeeves know how to do it.

JeevesBond — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:25:49 +0000

Nice one Abhi! And there was me thinking there was something eluding me, those instructions on the xfce site basically say it's fine to check the source out from their svn repo, I assumed the URL they'd point the average person to would be the last stable version! Obviously that's what I was missing!

Yes, it's YaST. I usually just grab the rpm for my distro and point YaST at it, that works but in this instance there wasn't one for SUSE 10, and I stupidly thought that I should download the source and compile it myself. I preferred Gentoo's package manager (forget what it's called but it's more elegant than bloomin' YaST) - I had Gentoo on my laptop, got as far as booting and Grub found the kernel to be corrupt... Then I had to leave for Canada! Just annoying as SUSE has a generic kernel, there's no choice about what stuff I want to support.

Anyway, the installer binary worked ok for home, and I've found a port of xfce for cygwin at work so should be ok.

Can a YaST (or any package manager) handle compiling and installing from source? I'm assuming not, but worth asking.

Thanks Abhi!

Abhishek Reddy — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:31:12 +0000

Don't build from SVN/CVS source if it is possible to avoid it. There is no guarantee that it'll work or follow spec. Only packaged and tested archives can be trusted to function with stability.

Distros usually come with their own package managers which you should use whenever possible. A package manager will let you easily download, install, update and remove most programs (available through distro-specific repositories). It makes your system easier to maintain as you won't have to keep track of everything that is installed, or follow up dependencies manually.

I can't remember what SuSE comes with (YaST?) - look it up and use it. Xfce is a popular enough package that I'm sure it'll be available.

If you must build from source, get the source archive, instead of code from the source repo directly. Usually this is a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 type archive. I think you'll find Xfce's at the Download page on xfce.org.