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I program and most of the time when using Linux the package manager breaks (meaning I get none or very little) or a lot of packages don't exist or cannot be compiled. I remember not being able to get libsdl on a version of Ubuntu.

What Linux distro is friendly and has packages for my compilation needs? Lots of points if it requires less reading and command line and more GUI and simple steps.

-edit- Example, i DL mandriva and could not install bison nor firefox 3.5.x At work using openSuse i could not update to the newest firefox

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I've abused a bunch of package manager over the years I have only ever broken them by deleting the on0disk database. What the heck have you been up to? – dmckee Oct 3 '09 at 20:30
dmckee: They seem to just be outdated with me not knowing how to update it. I still dont know why i couldnt DL ANY version of libsdl (it had a missing dependency and this was years ago) – acidzombie24 Oct 3 '09 at 20:35
if you've got an ancient (18+ months) version of Ubuntu installed, the package repositories have probably gone away. they maintain their LTS versions for several years, but non-LTS versions don't last. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is the current LTS version. – quack quixote Oct 3 '09 at 21:09
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5 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Debian is great with packages both with the CLI and GUI, I think this is why Ubuntu's package management is praised a little as well - Ubuntu is deb based, and you can use the debian repositories on Ubuntu for the most part.

Fedora has also impressed me lately. PackageKit has undergone quite a few nice improvements and is a great GUI frontend for package management. yum is pretty easy for the command line too. Here's a shot of PackageKit's frontend:

alt text

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up vote 8 down vote

Ubuntu, Ubuntu, and Ubuntu. :)

Seriously, you are doing something wrong here. Of the 10+ years I've been tinkering with Linux (since Red Hat 5 in '97), Ubuntu has given me the best package management impression so far.

Powerful CLI + GUI package management apps, extensive official repositories, huge selection of 3rd-party repositories, strong community knowledgebase and support - what else could you ask for?

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They could update things between major releases. i still can't get the latest firefox stable releases on Ubuntu 9.04 without installing them myself. And openTTD is still on 0.6.3 in the repos despite being at 0.7.3 officially . – Macha Oct 3 '09 at 19:30
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@Macha : I did not say Ubuntu is perfect. I just said it gave me the best impression so far of all distros I've tried. :) – caliban Oct 3 '09 at 19:34
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The very thing I hate about Ubutu is the concept of "major releases". The very point of packages is that you don't have to keep installing several releases, instead just upgrade what you need though the package manager. – MiffTheFox Oct 3 '09 at 19:36
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@MiffTheFox, in which case, you'd never have a stable system. There's always LFS if you want to do it yourself. Me? I prefer having some stability. A set of packages that has been tested to work well together. – EmmEff Oct 3 '09 at 20:11
I am using Ubuntu LTS. How do i say... get the most recent vlc and firefox? i tried but could not get the most recent update. I'm surprised i am not able to get version >= 3.5 firefox. – acidzombie24 Dec 9 '09 at 12:12
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up vote 6 down vote

OpenSUSE's YaST has a very friendly GUI and a wealth of repositories to search .

Update: If you need to install Firefox 3.5 , you can find it in the mozilla repository. Heck, you can even install the 3.6 alphas from the mozilla alpha repository. In openSUSE it's a matter of visiting the search page, looking for the package, and clicking 1-click-install.

YaST

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+1. I share your respect for RPM. – A Dwarf Oct 3 '09 at 19:43
Indeed, YaST is pretty good. – alex Oct 3 '09 at 20:35
I second that, +1. As for the Cannot update to the latest version of FF part, its depends on your repo. some repos update faster than others, use software.opnesuse.org/search to get the latest, or add new repos. – alpha1 Oct 4 '09 at 1:24
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up vote 2 down vote

I recommend using any derivative of Debian, and using checkinstall or debuild to install any programs that aren't in the repos. Using these, you can keep your entire system under the control of the package manager, which should help prevent breakage. Here are some example use cases for each tool (packages and version numbers made up):

You're running Ubuntu 9.04 which has libsomething version 3, and you want to install something that requires libsomething version 4. First, check if the development branch (Ubuntu 9.10) has libsomething version 4 by searching http://packages.ubuntu.com/. If it does, you can try to download the deb file and install it.

This may not work, because the libsomething-4.deb from the devel repos might have been compiled with other updated versions of packages. If it doesn't work, you can download the source and use debuild to generate a deb. You may have to run apt-get build-dep libsomething first, in order to install the packages needed to compile libsomething.

To run debuild, simply unpack the source tarball, and cd into the resulting directory. Then run debuild, instead of your usual ./configure; make; sudo make install. If there are no errors, you'll be left with a deb file, which you can install.

If libsomething version 4 is not in the devel repos at packages.ubuntu.com, next try packages.debian.org. If that doesn't work, then you;ll have to download the source from libsomething's own webpage and compile it yourself, using checkinstall to install it. To do this, download the source tarball from the libsomething website and unpack it. Do the usual ./configure; make, but instead of sudo make install, use sudo checkinstall. This will install the program while keeping track of exactly what files it installs. Then it will make a deb file out of them and install that. This allows the source-installed package to be managed by the package manager.

In summary, apt provides many ways to accomodate source-built packages without breaking the package manager by installing things manually outside of its knowledge.

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debuild sounds very useful indeed. – oyvindio Dec 17 '09 at 1:30
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up vote 1 down vote

Gobo is an interesting distro that does away with package management as we know it, and just has standalone, encapsulated directories for each application. You install a program by copying it in, you uninstall it by deleting it. No wedged dependencies, no screwed-up conflicts; I wish every distro worked this way.

I also like good old Slack which just uses plain old tar.gz instead of anything complicated-and-fragile.

(Do I actually use either of these as my everyday desktop? Sigh, no: I just use Ubuntu like everyone else; there is value in being on the same platform as other people. They screw up the repos less often than they used to, at least, but a dist-upgrade is still a gamble.)

Compiling something from source shouldn't normally be terribly difficult, except that most distros don't include the header files for any of their libraries; always irritating to have to track down which -dev package you're missing.

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