Horse crap... "sudo yum install gnome", wait for the packages to download and install, logout and switch your desktop session to Gnome, and you're done... I've done this with Fedora, YDL, RHEL, and Centos. However I don't know why you'd wanna run Gnome (or KDE) on a PS3 with the limited RAM it has. If you can't manage your way around Enlightenment then Xfce might be a little more palpable while still running a little light on memory.
The issue I have with the shipping GUI frontend is not the installing per se, but the removal of superfluous packages, and there are
lots that I'd class as superfluous for the PS3. I wanted a lean trim due to memory and hard disk concerns (10GB partition), and it just isn't doable with the GUI. You remove a package like Cups or whatever it was, and dependent packages will need to be uninstalled. No big deal you might say, every package manager works like that. If I remove cupsys in Ubuntu, Synaptic will complain that "xubuntu-desktop" depends on it and will be removed. That's safe to ignore because xubuntu-desktop is a mere meta package that contains no actual software but is a one-stop helper to install the "definitive" desktop. There are two key differences though:
1)Synaptic
tells you about the dependency. "Package X depends on package Y! As you chose to remove package Y, package X can no longer function, and we'll have to remove it now as well. Okay/Cancel". On YDL OTOH you find out that there is
some dependency problem only when you ask to have your changes applied, but the program will not inform you about the details of that dependency. You will be told which packages will go due to some of their dependencies being removed, but you will not know which they are (i.e. which you must keep to also keep the dependent package installed).
2)The package manager will happily bounce off the dependent package and go down the package dependency tree in the opposite direction. It will remove what I'll call "sibling" packages for lack of a better term. I.e. if you install the Gnome desktop and then remove cupsys or nautilus or whatever, you'll lose gdm.
It happened to me to an extent that I had to re-download hundreds of MB of binary packages, because the package manager just removed
everything when all I wanted was to switch to XFCE and get rid of memory hogs.
Because the package manager doesn't produce enough information about the dependency problems, I can't even tell you what was going on there. I just did it the hard way (let the system be killed and then redownload everything that my wanted packages truly depend on) because I didn't see another.
Horse shit indeed.
archie4oz said:
2)
As far as package management goes, apt is simply just more mature than yum and (IMO) most gui tools built upon either aren't all that great (although apt gui front ends are in general a lot more snappier). I think YaST is still superior to both as far as system management goes but it's had a lot more commercial support over the years.
I think Synaptic on Ubuntu is close enough to perfect for me. They have scripts or whatever for
everything now. E.g. if you update your php or apache2 packages on a system with a live web-server, Synaptic will stop it, update it and restart it, all seamless and automagic, with your configuration still intact. 30 seconds downtime, tops, and all you have to do is hit apply once.
I like that.
archie4oz said:
Actually that's incorrect. Fedora *is* Red Hat. Or at least the free version. It's also more of an edge/development phase of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) while RHEL is composed of more mature and tested packages (plus it costs money). Yellow Dog is a fork of Red Hat (originally it was Red Hat with PowerPC support).
This isn't a very good analogy either. Ubuntu is in general more aggressive with releases and updates and isn't as stable as Debian. Same with Fedora, it's more developmental/less stable than RHEL thus YDL is more like Debian than Ubuntu.
Thanks for the corrections.
archie4oz said:
Actually I'd disagree in this regard. You can actually do binary installs of Gentoo (just like Deb/Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.). Building from source is simply an option, albeit the more attractive option IMO if you're going to bother with it.
Customization is Gentoo's big selling point, is it not? Compiler options, use flags, access to a wide range of versions per package from ancient to bleeding-edge. I had a Gentoo install for a while, and of course it did work, but I didn't perceive it as a good tradeoff for normal desktop use. Had to compile a lot and often, and didn't really feel it was worth it.
