[CVALE] which apps work

[Jason Roysdon]

I concur with what Patrick is saying.  You'll typically run into
dependency hell - where things are packaged differently and product A
will required product B, but product B was packaged with B and C in your
distro so you cannot replace it with just B, etc.

However, if you stay within a family of distros, you can often get a
SRPM (Source RPM) and recompile it with the SPEC file fairly easily and
the dependency problem doesn't exist (as much anyway).

For instance, say Fedora 10 has an RPM you need on a RedHat Enterprise
Linux (RHEL) 5 system or CentOS (free version) - you could rebuild the
SRPM: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/RebuildSRPM

Of course, that all broke with Fedora 11's new version of RPM and some
things that are not backward compatible with prior versions.  There are
still ways around that (install the SRPM with an F11 system to an NFS
mount, then build from that to your
RHEL/CentOS/older-Fedora/other-RH-friendly-distro).

When RHEL6/CentOS6 ships, it'll have the newer RPM system, and then this
should work again for using F11 and newer SRPMs.  If RHEL6 is based on
F11 (or perhaps they might wait for F12) then you can generally get away
with just installing the binary RPM right from Fedora.

RHEL5 is based on Fedora Core 6, so this holds true taking FC6 RPMs and
installing them on RHEL5 systems.  Of course this isn't supported by RH,
but then that's why you run CentOS for free and w/o official support.

As you mentioned RedHat, I'll share my two cents to anyone wanting to
learn Linux (as you sound like you'd like to) and who wants to use those
skills in a large corporate environment (i.e. get paid nicely) - learn
RedHat.  Everything you learn with CentOS is 100% binary compatible and
transferable knowledge for servers, and Fedora is just the cutting edge
for your desktops.

I was fortunate to get handed RedHat 5.2 CDs back in '98 and that's just
what I've learned - but it's what I've found 75% of the time in
professionally run IT places.  It's what Cisco has for their backend of
most products (I do a large amount of Cisco work).  The next major share
of commercial account installs/products I see is Debian, followed by old
UNIXs (DEC, HPUX, Solaris/SunOS) - but your generic Linux skills will
get you by just fine there.

Best of all, RedHat hasn't sold their soul like Novell/SUSE have.
RedHat is what Google wishes it could be when they say, "Do no evil" or
whatever their silly thing is.

Best of all, I never have to "sell" or justify RedHat.  I suggest CentOS
and many folks use it.  The really professional places insist on buying
RedHat so they can get direct support for the product - of course these
same places do the same for Cisco, HP, or Dell products.

Jason Roysdon
http://Roysdon.net

Patrick Bennett wrote:
> As a rule distro-packages will not easily install from one distro to 
> another, and its generally not wise to try to force them.  On an Ubuntu 
> system, you'd first want to use apt from the command line, or the 
> graphical software package manager under the "System"/"Preferences" tree 
> of your desktop (which is just a front end to the "apt" and "dpkg" suite 
> of commands).  Some software, obviously, is not available through the 
> official Ubuntu repositories that apt and its graphical front end 
> access.  In these cases, quite often an Ubuntu package is available from 
> the software maintainer - since Ubuntu is a quite popular distro, this 
> is pretty common. If not you probably want to use a "tar" package, which 
> is, in plain language, a generic way to package software for use on any 
> distro; in some cases you can use the debian-specific distro packages on 
> Ubuntu, but personally I don't recommend it, as it can become a fast 
> route to the dreaded land known as "Dependency Hell".
> 
>     -Patrick
> 
> 
> netuser at ainet.com wrote:
>> I just installed Ubuntu. I am wondering which packages will work. Will 
>> packages (applications?) from other programs work (Mandrake, RedHat, 
>> etc.) work with Ubuntu??
>>
>>  
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