On Wed, 2010-07-14 at 21:39 +0100, Steve wrote:
Thanks for the feedback and the invite to the meetings.
I guess that much of the content of these emails is soo far above my head I assumed the meets would be the same.
To clarify my question about repos, my understanding was that "mostly" linux is a core kernel that at some particular point is basically the same, some distros use the cutting edge version others stay back a bit.
If there's broadly a common basis and one overcomes the packaging differences (why can't they all be the same?), and the dependencies work themselves out shouldn't the bits basically all work.
Yes, the term Linux really refers to a kernel. The kernel provides various features such as CPU and memory management, inter-process communication, filesystems and networking and a way of sending data to/from more specialised hardware.
The exact way kernel features are invoked depend on the processor but usually involve some kind of trap. In practice this difference is hidden behind a set of stubs in the standard C library which provide the published interface.
Although in theory applications can be written to use the kernel features directly most applications tend to use the services of one ore more libraries and this provides another area where there can be different versions and why package management is a good idea.
In practice both the kernel and the major libraries try to remain backwards compatible where possible but this is not always guaranteed.
Anyways I don't really need a further response re repos as I have got the message from you guys that its best not to mix it up, and I suppose that the mainstream packages will appear in all the main repositories.
Most of the commonly used packages are available in many of the distributions. If you have specific needs you may want a distribution that specialises in that need otherwise a modern mainstream distribution will be fine. You'll find loads of packages to do lots of useful things and on the odd occasion you find something interesting that is not part of your distribution there are ways to make it work.
As an example, if you have a debian-based distribution and need to install something only available as an RPM (Redhat etc.) there is alien to convert the package from one to another.
Another route is to compile the odd package from source. This is perhaps not as daunting as it seems as the compiler and tools are free and generally available as part of your distribution and many packages use an automatic configuration system (e.g. GNU autoconf) to configure themselves to your system. This means in many cases all you need is:
./configure make make install
HTH, Steve,