----- Original Message ----- From: John Smiley To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 12:10 PM Subject: SuSE Newbie: Why does SuSE use custom RPMs? I am new to SuSE linux and have been having a hard time getting used to the use of "SuSE RPMs" as opposed to the usual RPMs I see posted everywhere on the web. For example, it's easy to find 'modutils-x.x.x.rpm' to update the latest version of modutils on most linux distributions, but SuSE uses 'modules.rpm'. And if I try to instal the modutils rpm from say, SourceForge, I get a message saying that it conflicts with files in SuSE's 'modules' package. Another example: SuSE uses lx-suse.rpm and lx-hack.rpm for the "official" and "non-supported" versions of the kernel. Everyone else seems to simply use linux-2.x.x. It's especially hard to determine the version number of a SuSE RPM without querying it from rpm. The standard I see everywhere else is to include the version number in the rpm file name. This is making it extremely hard for me to experiment. I would like to try the new 2.4.x kernel, and I've seen the posts about downloading an rpm from ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/mantel/next/ , but this is hardly main stream! I don't want to depend on someone else to put together a package that is compatible with SuSE. I want to download the kernel from ftp.kernel.org, read the Changes docs, download the appropriate versions of the required packages and compile my kernel. Please help. I'm very impressed by the amount of support SuSE provides, especially where Oracle is concerned. Regards, John R. Smiley