Suse....rpms....yast..updates??

[Wildheart]

K, I've been very fond of Suse so far because of the awesome packaging system Yast. I think the rpm support is great. But I was surfing freshmeat and noticed a new release of gaim. I quickly checked my version # against the new one and I'm quite behind. I quickly went to Yast and did an online update for gaim and updated. To my dismay when I checked gaim afterwards it was still way behind. Now when I went to sourceforge to download it there are packages for either debian,mandrake,redhat and fedora. But nothing for Suse. Now which rpm would be best and install in the same spot as I already have it. I could just install any rpm and it would work but I would like to understand which distro's rpm is most compatible with Suse.

It's so frustrating not knowing whats going on in my comp and not having complete understanding of it anymore. Could someone please give me some insite on updating programs in Suse the proper way.

[jro]

Emm, your probably not going to like this answer but your probably just going to have to wait until there is an official Suse RPM of the newest version of gaim to update. Usually RPM's require specific dependencies to install, and rather than actually looking for the libraries it needs the installer looks to see if the specific RPM that contains the library has been installed. What this means for you is unless you have the proper Suse specific RPMs that support Gaim, installation will fail with any other distro's RPM's. Because while you may have suse-lib-1.3.1, the RPM might be looking for mdk-lib-1.3.1. They are the same library, just named differently and the installation of the RPM will complain and fail.

Or, if you are SURE you have all the needed libraries you can just force the installation of the RPM, telling the installer to ignore dependencies and install it anyway. Once the package is installed Gaim is going to look for the libraries like any other binary. So in that case you can just go ahead and install any RPM from any distro, but things can get sticky really quick if you do this.

Hope this helps a bit!

[Wildheart]

I found a Suse rpm site while searching around the net this morning. It had the latest Gaim. Worked like a charm! Thanks for the info btw.

[penguin_powered]

Wildheart,

What site did you find? You found your own answer but never shared it with the rest of us. The beauty of these forums is the knowledge and info exchange--so don't be a mizer. LOL

Here's my contribution to answering your questiion:

Here are a couple of SuSE rpm sites I found and added to YASTs list of servers. To add these, go into YAST and click on Software (in list on leftside of YAST Control Center window). Then on the rightside click on 'Change Source of Installation'. A new window appears, YAST2 Software Source Media. In that window, click on Add and enter the info below.

NOTE: These are NOT official SuSE mirror sites, but rather sites where you can find packages that others have created specifically for SuSE (in this case, SuSE Linux Professional 9.2). The Official SuSE sites offer you security upgrades ONLY. The sites below offer newer versions of programs than the Official SuSE sites, plus they offer additional software NOT offered by the Official SuSE sites. BE SURE to use YAST to install packages from these 3rd party package sites!!

(Change the version number to your version of SuSE if not 9.2)

Name: Packman (SuSE LINUX 9.2)
URL: http://packman.iu-bremen.de/suse/9.2

Name: guru (SUSE LINUX 9.2)
URL: http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/9.2/

I wrote these out exactly as they appear in my list of software installation sources.

I found these sites by doing a Google search for 'SuSE Packages' and 'SuSE RPMs'. I suggest you choose your sites carefully, as anyone could set them up and load them with packages to hack your box!! USER BEWARE!!!!!!