Re: help with installation

[Laura Conrad]

>>>>> "Michael" == Michael J McGonagle <Michael> writes:

    Michael> I still think if I am going to change/upgrade my
    Michael> distribution, I will move to Debian. 

I had that idea too.   I agree that the Debian package manager
probably works better than the RPM stuff (not rpm itself, but urpmi
and the graphical version).  Unfortunately, no package manager can
work any better than the information given it by the package
maintainers, and Debian seems to get even less testing of its
individual packages than Mandrake does.  Or at least that is the
conclusion I come to based on the fact that upgrading from the current
stable to the current testing version caused me not to be able to get
into X because the default font wasn't installed.  

    Michael> Anyway, I will see if I can get all of guile installed,
    Michael> and try the sources again. I think that if this problem
    Michael> is caused by some part of guile that Lilypond needs, then
    Michael> upgrading to 8.1 might not be necessary.

As I said, if you need printing (and who doesn't?) I don't recommend
8.1.

    >> Mine certainly wasn't.  I did the reinstall when I stopped being able
    >> to do rpm even for simple things.  I think that version of urpmi or
    >> the GUI that went with it was seriously bad.

    Michael> Quite frankly, I have never been able to do anything with
    Michael> 'rpm' except view the contents of an archive, or possible
    Michael> unpack it, but I have never been able to install any rpm
    Michael> packages. 

When you say "rpm -Uvh <filename.rpm> does it not install?  It should
have when your install was virgin.  Unless you were missing
dependancies, which in the case of a complicated package is likely.
I think mine continued to do that, but stopped being able to do things
like:

        rpm -qa | grep guile

But I learned about using rpm because I started using RPM based
distributions before there were wrappers that knew how to read the rpm
database.  If I were starting now, I'd stick to urpmi, urpmf, and
friends.  But they still have a way to go in stability -- I had to
edit the list of sources by hand when I added my 8.2 beta3 cd's,
because the Software Manager got the format wrong when I used it.

-- 
Laura (mailto:address@hidden , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097  fax: (801) 365-6574 
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139