If you are a Fedora user then you must be using RPM Fusion and if you are not then please do since it provides you with many cool packages that Fedora doesn’t come with (like ATI & nVidia drivers, video and audio codec…etc). After you install RPM Fusion repositories (through their provided rpm packages which you can find about under the ‘Configuration’ in their website) you will be able to use it right away from the command line by using ‘yum’ or if you like the GUI (like I do) then it is PackageKit. However, there is one thing that I don’t like about PackageKit which is dealing with dependencies.PackageKit will only resolve dependencies when you apply the changes not while you are making them (selecting to install or remove a package). I find that annoying since sometimes when I select to remove some packages that I think I don’t need and when I click on apply it will show the list of dependencies of all the selected packages and will not tell you which one of the selected packages is needed by those other packages and the only way to find out is by removing packages one by one. Same thing when installing. However, there is a solution to this problem, it is called Smart, Smart is a package manager that can be used to manage ‘rpm’ packages (and also apt as well). You can install Smart and the GUI from Fedora repos with this command:
1 | yum install smart smart-gui |
The biggest advantage of using Smart over PackageKit is the way it resolves dependencies. Smart will do that instantly while you are clicking to install a new package or trying to remove one. So for example if you are using Fedora with KDE and wanted to remove all Gnome packages and you clicked for example on ‘gnome-vfs2’ Smart will immediately look for all other packages that depends on this one and if any it will show you a windows of the list of all other packages that will be removed as a result of removing this one, among that list you will find ‘Firefox’, ‘vlc’ and other packages that I actually need, so that means this one is important and i will just hit cancel to keep it. Same thing when for example you want to install and try some application but you find that it needs many other packages to be installed as well.
However, it seems that Fedora and RPMfusion are not giving much attention to Smart and the channels files (channel = repo) are not updated for Fedora 14 (was also the case for F13 when it was released) so I decided to update those packages myself and maybe find a way to send them to Fedora and RPMFusion so they will sign them and add them to their main repositories.
Download the appropriate files for your system or the source if you wanna compile the rpms and sign them yourself (you will need to rerun Smart so it detects the changes):
Update: Since not much attention from Fedora and RPMfusion is giving to Smart and it is not supported anymore I stopped making the rpms for it.