Linux Journal: View from the Trenches: Alternative Package Sources

“A couple of anonymous suggestions in response to last week’s
article inspired this week’s installment of View from the Trenches.
I had downloaded GAIM, the multiprotocol GTK instant messaging
client and compiled it from source. This was a rather painful
process, given all the -devel packages I had to chase down and
install. One commenter suggested I try the usr local bin site to
get pre-packaged GTK goodies for SuSE. I had no idea such a site
existed, and I thought it would be a good idea to share not only
this particular site but a number of sites that are helpful for
finding Linux packages that aren’t in the standard
distribution.

“I’ll start with SuSE, as we’ve already touched on one site. In
addition to usr local bin, which primarily offers GNOME/GTK stuff,
we have PackMan, which has a number of packages ranging from games
to MySQL drivers. Some of these appear to be a bit out of date, but
there are a lot of them. As with a lot of SuSE stuff, some of this
site is in German. You should be able to figure out things by the
package names themselves, but if you get stuck, Babelfish can help
translate. A number of multimedia-oriented packages are hosted on
bytesex.org, including bttv, krecord, video4linux patches and
documentation and linda, a client-server approach to a headless MP3
jukebox.

“If you’re dealing with SuSE, you’re dealing with RPMs, and that
brings me to one of the bigger cross-platform RPM sites,
Rpmfind.net. This Daniel Veillard project is hosted by the World
Wide Web Consortium, with several mirror sites. Rpmfind has
packages for almost everything you can think of for distributions
ranging from ASP to Yellow Dog, both official and unofficial
versions, as well as GNOME, KDE, Ximian, MySQL and blinux (Linux
for the blind; it involves a kernel module, a serial port and a
speech synthesizer, and it works quite well)…”

Complete
Story