ok. RPMs for different distros. Whats the difference exactly?

[MadSkillzMan]

ok guys im running suse 9.1 (its a miracle i got it on here). It has like NOTHING on it. I did an FTP install anyways. I tried to download GAIM. i get to the site and theres .rpms for mandrake, redhat, fedora cores 1 and 2...and the source..ive never compiled anything....i dont know why i need the different .RPMs.

I KNOW u guys have the answer. I think its time i learn it lol

 

[Christoph]

I haven't used SUSE or looked in-depth at any RPM-based distro's layout, but my *guess* is that there are different RPMs because distros need different config files modified, provide different libraries for a given dependency and may have different styles of init scripts. Note the asterisks around "guess".
I do know that it doesn't make a huge difference. You can make pretty much any package work on any distro, given the right tools and enough knowledge about the target distro.

 

[MadSkillzMan]

hah christoph isnt sure...wow....

Im assuming u compile from source?

 

[Titan386]

You can try compiling from source, but chances are that configure will fail due to unresolved dependencies. The best way to fix that sort of problem is to use YaST2 to install all the packages that configure complains about. When it says it can't find a library, make sure you install the development package. For example, if configure says that gtk2 is missing, install gtk2 and gtk2-devel (those might not be the exact names, but you get the picture).

The last time I tried compiling gaim on Suse (8.2), I needed to install gtk2 and pkg-config, and maybe some others. Also, it seemed that Suse put the gtk headers in a weird place, so I needed to specify an include directory to configure for the build to complete successfully.

BTW, you can probably install gaim via YaST2. It won't be as recent a version that what you can get from sourceforge, but dependencies will be resolved automagically.

 

[Christoph]

hah christoph isnt sure...wow....

Im assuming u compile from source?

Whoops! Looks like time for a coverup. I'm afraid I'll have to kill you now.

 

[MadSkillzMan]

lol christoph.

Actually i did compile from source on GAIM. I tried the RPM thing, and itd error out or something dumb. But thats because i was trying to use .rpms intended for redhat/mandrake. thats where my curiosity came from

Yea, gaim asked for GTK2, the GLIB2.0...so in order to get Glib i had to get pkg..etc...YaST2 had some out of date versions, so i did my own from source.

I was freakin out when i FINALLY compiled it!!! First linux compile ever. Then i moved on to Kopete which took something nuts like 45mins to compile. Works perfect though and it runs faster than when i had it on mandrake as a .rpm.

 

[SickBoy]

Ahh, the beauty of Gentoo... emerge gaim.....

:-D

 

[MadSkillzMan]

....shut up.....<----- jealousy

 

[Chief_Wiggum]

Most of the distros package their files differently. So RH may have a library under one path where SuSE may have it somewhere else. You need the correct rpm for the distro you have. If you can get the source rpm, you can compile and build an RPM from that. Then you can install the built rpm.