[LUNI] A little lost with Redhat 4.0 ES

[Demetri Mouratis]

Hi Ramin,

I think I can help.  Answers inline below:
On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Ramin K wrote:

> 1. Where are all the packages?
> 	Looking for things like imagemagick, lame, ffmpeg, mplayer, etc. 
> up2date -l doesn't really find anything which seems odd. Is this some channel 
> problem, do I need to setup some yum thing, just track all these down 
> individually, or build them myself.

RHEL tends to be pretty sparse with package support.  ImageMagick is 
there, note the caps.  I have lame installed from the DAG repository, 
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/yum/.  I'm also using ffmeg and mplayer 
though the developers here package that as part of our SVN repository.  As 
you've said, we use a custom yum repository to make these available to our 
systems.

>
> 2. Can I get new versions?
> 	Mysql 5, Apache 2.2, and PHP 5.1 would be really nice if they exist 
> somewhere.

This is a major problem.  RHEL takes a stable but old approach.  Apache is 
httpd-2.0.52, Mysql is mysql-server-4.1.20-1, PHP is php-4.3.9.  Later 
(the latest?) versions are in Fedora Core 5 soon to be RHEL5.  I suggest 
running at least some FC5 in your environement to get a sense of where 
RHEL is going and to take advnantage of a much larger repository. 
Unforutnately, mixing repos is a sure path the RPM dependency hell so be 
carefull.

> 3. Is there some nice web page that tells me all this?
> 	I've been poking around RHN, but haven't found a "you already know 
> Linux, here are all the Redhat-ism shortcuts" page.

Thinking of how I learned all this, and honestly I can't point to one 
source that stands out.  If you've already found your way onto RHN you 
should know that searching/finding packages there is pretty simple.  I'll 
also through in a suggestion for the RHN Satellite Server.  You can think 
of this as having your own RHN where you could fold in things like 
custom-compiled mplayer and third-party lame packages all while managing 
everything through a GUI.

Any further questions just ask.  I've been running RHEL in production for 
the past 5 years or so and have a good idea of how stuff works there.

-D