On Sunday 23 December 2007 02:50:13 Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
Anders Johansson wrote:
Hi,
Version updates for released products are extremely rare. Essentially, they only happen when there is a serious bug or security problem, and a backport of the fix is too complicated
So yes, if you really want updated versions of the software, you need to either update to the latest suse release, or get the packages from the build service, as you have found
Now THAT ANSWERS my question, and poses a new one.
If I do decide to download a version update via rpm of software, then I will have to install it by hand to resolve dependencies and compile, and or use the 1-Click install mentioned below ?
1-click is easier because Yast automatically resolves dependencies for you. Manually installing from rpm's is OK, but you will have to resolve the dependencies yourself - not always as easy as it sounds. Installing from source can be even trickier and not recommended for novices, but you should learn how to do it if you want to try an application for which binary packages haven't been created for your distro. Bear in mind though that apps installed from source are not included in the rpm database of installed packages and therefore won't be automatically updated.
The trick now is to know what to do when I have downloaded the rpm, and of course which directory to download it to on my system / i.e. /usr, /usr/bin, opt/ i.e. where is a logical folder that I can download software for my system to, besides the classic Linux answer of 'anywhere'?
I set aside a folder called "Downloads" with a symlink to my home directory
and store all downloaded files there. That way I can keep them for future
re-use, or decide to delete them when no longer needed (until the day after
they're deleted :-) ).
To install a package manually from an rpm you need to be root (use 'su -' and
enter root's password, or use sudo), chdir to the directory where you
downloaded the rpm and do 'rpm -ivh