IBBoard

Just a slightly off-topic blog entry because I'm finding it so useful recently, but I definately do like YUM.

For those who don't know, I have a laptop with Fedora Core Linux installed on it that I do all of my PHP programming on (I wouldn't trust Windows to be a good and reasonable web server for PHP). Before that I had Redhat 9 and before that was Redhat 7.3. Both of these had an "up2date" service to allow you to update packages, but I didn't use it for installing much. Now, Fedora Core has a package manager called YUM and I'm really liking it.

OK, so like much of Linux it's still command line based, but I'm sure someone has probably made a GUI for it. What I really like is how simple it is to use, how powerful it is and how it resolves dependancies for me. Installing individual packages was always a pain because you'd download something, find it needed something else that you didn't have and go and hunt that other thing down. Once you'd hunted it down, the new thing could end up having something else as a dependancy, and you'd be forced to hunt again. YUM resolves all of those dependencies for you and just asks "do you want to download this and all of it's dependancies at X many MB?"

Even more useful at this very moment is that you can query it for "what provides file Y?" and it'll tell you the package and then you can install it if it's listed.

Now, back to improving the usability of my laptop through the use of Widgets/applets and Mac-styling!