Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
I am feeling very stupid asking these questions but feel that it is in everyone's interest, as it will hopefully create a meaningful explanation of repositories to enable newbies, and others, to better understand the term of repositories or repos and what/when to use them.
I so far have the oss, non-oss and update repo loaded via Yast and am wondering why there are repos for Firefox, Openoffice.org etc. Are these available for the braver souls to use as they might break something in openSuSe?
Yes.
Repos as a software store are handy but do I need a repo for each program I install so that I can get updates to the app?
No. Repositories are collections of software packages that you can install on your SUSE system. The following rough categorization has proved useful for me: 1) Official stable repositories: oss, non-oss, update. They should be always enabled; this is the definitive source for your SUSE installation. 2) 3rd party repositories: Software collections that are not by SUSE. These are those where the URL's host name does not end in opensuse.org. The most important of those is Packman. It adds all kins of media formats that SUSE must not distribute for license and patent reasons. See http://opensuse-community.org/Repositories for more information. Also of interest may be the NVidia and ATI repositories, if you have respective video cards. See http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories 3) SUSE repositories for projects. They hold more current versions of applications. (Applications on your SUSE system are only made more current when you upgrade to a newer distribution.) Important projects with such repositories are: KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice, Mozilla. They have URLs where the project name is prominently at the front, after the host name. Very often these versions are brand-new, it is problematic to tell a generic recommendation if one shall use them. Rule of thumb here is: If you want to try out a newer version, install it using these repositories. If you are not interested and are satisfied with your applications, leave them off. 4) SUSE repositories for areas of interest. E.g., a collection of network management packages, or Perl packages, or similar. They have URLs with generic part names, like http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/network:/utilities/ The content of these repositories is most often very spotty, may conflict with your base installation, and they are often not well looked at. You should use such repositories only if you need an application from them that is not in one of the repositories from above. (See below how one finds applications.) 5) Personal SUSE contributor repositories. They have a URL part with home:/ in them. Stay away if you are not confident to use experimental software or if you urgently want an application from there. (Here's to lnussel who provides plan for old farts like me!)
If I want to install an application that is openSuSe specific/compatible, where should I look?
You use http://packages.opensuse-community.org/ to search for packages. This service searches both package names and descriptions. A command line version of that search service is available as package webpin. You'll need an Internet connection for it to work.
Looking at the repo service I am bombarded with terms of build service, factory, oss, non-oss, update, src-oss etc.
Build service (aka OBS) is a developers' tool to create packages in repositories. All SUSE repository packages are created with that service. For that reason, the set of all repositories that are available via http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/ are sometimes colloqially [sp?] called build service repositories. Factory is the snapshot of the next SUSE release. Don't use it on systems that you rely on, this is for experimentation. If you've heard of Debian unstable or Fedora rawhide, that's like them. src-oss is the repository with Sources for your basic openSUSE packages. OK, 'nuff for now. I hope this helps; explanation of "how to use repositories with experimental software in a controlled way without hosing up my system" is left for another time... ;-) Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod Email: jschrod@acm.org Roedermark, Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org