:: Omnia Mutantur ::

:: Tuesday, May 21, 2002 ::

Interesting developments

The Register has published a note about the letter from Peruvian Congressman David Villanueva Nuñez to Microsoft Perú, basically demolishing point by point Microsft's usual arguments against GNU/Linux and Open Source, and also noting how said arguments often contradict each other.

Basically, Microsoft tried to convince Congressman Villanueva that a new law requiring providers to deliver the source code of any application they sell to the State would work against competition, security, blah blah blah. Congressman Villanueva then went on to educately but mercilessly destroy each and every one of their false claims.

Si la desean leer en Español, pueden encontrarla aquí. No puedo esperar a que pasen una ley así en Costa Rica.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 10:53 AM [+] ::
...

Installing KDE 3 on Red Hat 7.2

Eager and curious that you are, you download the 150+ MBs of KDE 3 (excluding the sets for Chinese, Arabic and so on) into your machine. You read the simple instructions:

• cd /where/you/downloaded/the/KDE3/RPMS


• rpm -e `rpm -qa |egrep ^kde`


• rpm -Uvh *rpm

You execute them. You wait with bathed breath. It doesn't work.

There's a bit more to it than that. I'll try to help, but don't blame me if you FUBAR your system.

First of all, there might be some packages that depend on KDE but don't fit the ^kde naming pattern set out on the second line. Some of these in my case were:

• licq-kde


• kdbg


• kdevelop

There packages will need to be removed manually, by typing:

rom -q package-name-here

There you go. The uninstall part is now complete, and if you boot up to your system you will be greeted by an extremely ugly XFree86 prompt. Don't worry - just press CTRL-ALT-F1 to switch to a placid text-mode screen where you can continue.

Now for the installation. I got several issues here:

• Xconfigurator version wasn't high enough


• A package called kdepim-pilot-3.0.0-1.i386.rpm had unsatisfied dependencies


• Some librpm files were missing

You need several packages here, which you can find at RPMFind.net (many thanks to Brian Downey for providing the location of some of these). They are:

• Xconfigurator-4.10.4-1.i386.rpm


• pkgconfig-0.7.0-3.i386.rpm


• popt-1.6.4-7x.i386.rpm


• pilot-link-0.9.5-8.i386.rpm


• rpm2html-1.7-3.7x.i386.rpm


• rpm-4.0.4-7x.i386.rpm


• rpm-build-4.0.4-7x.i386.rpm


• rpm-devel-4.0.4-7x.i386.rpm


• rpmfind-1.7-4.7x.i386.rpm


• rpm-perl-4.0.4-7x.i386.rpm


• rpm-python-4.0.4-7x.i386.rpm

I stil haven't solved the kdepim-pilot dependency, so I'd advise you to move that RPM to another directory before installing and then including it manually later, when you have the corresponding library at hand. Something important: you might not find all of these packages for Red Hat 7.2 Don't worry: just use the more recent version for RawHide.

Place all of these files in the same directory than your KDE 3 RPMs and then execute

rpm -Uvh *rpm

You should be ready to go. Again, this worked for me and there is no certainty it will work for you - but it might give you a head start.

:: Ricardo J. Méndez 12:09 PM [+] ::
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