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Grrr, CentOS!
Sunday, February 8th, 2015 06:11 pmI've been using Fedora Linux, and its RedHat ancestors for fourteen odd years now. People keep suggesting I should switch to a different distro, but I've resisted because I'm familiar with the way this one works. However, it has the disadvantage of a very fast release cycle: each release is only supported for thirteen months, and though I've got setting things back up so that I can do it in a single Sunday now, there will still normally bit little bits I'll be discovering for the following week or two that need tweaking.
Last week, I realised I'd overshot the end of the Fedora 19 support cycle when Firefox started refusing to play videos because the Flash plugin was out-of-date. I'd been recommended to switch to CentOS, which is another branch of the RedHat Linux family, but which has ten year support periods, so I thought I'd try that.
After installing, I discovered the repositories I needed were different, but after most of the day, I managed to get most of the software I use working, but there were exceptions. VLC and MPlayer's dependencies clash, so I can't get them both working at once. FFMPEG refuses to install. But most annoyingly, there's no package anywhere on the Net to install Hugin, the photo-stitching software I use a lot, for CentOS. All I can find on the Web is people posting for help, saying they couldn't manage it with CentOS 6 (I'm using CentOS 7), and being recommended to compile it themselves, but running into dependency hell.
I tried myself; when I realised I was running into difficulty building libpano13 so I could install libpano13-devel so I could compile Hugin itself, I knew I'd gone out of my depth. (And now my yum repository is screwed because I was installing non-CentOS 7 versions of other packages just to try and get Hugin to build.)
I'm furious. I don't want to doing this kind of stuff at home; I just want software to work either out of the box, or following a simple set of instructions on the Web. But now it looks like a piece of software I use all the time is completely uninstallable, and there's nothing I can do about it. I'm half tempted to go back to the latest version of Fedora, but I really don't want to have to waste a second Sunday (I don't have time for the job any other day of the week, and sometimes not even on Sunday) doing that!
I don't suppose by any chance there's anyone reading this who's managed to get Hugin or an equivalent photo-stitching program running under CentOS, is there?
Last week, I realised I'd overshot the end of the Fedora 19 support cycle when Firefox started refusing to play videos because the Flash plugin was out-of-date. I'd been recommended to switch to CentOS, which is another branch of the RedHat Linux family, but which has ten year support periods, so I thought I'd try that.
After installing, I discovered the repositories I needed were different, but after most of the day, I managed to get most of the software I use working, but there were exceptions. VLC and MPlayer's dependencies clash, so I can't get them both working at once. FFMPEG refuses to install. But most annoyingly, there's no package anywhere on the Net to install Hugin, the photo-stitching software I use a lot, for CentOS. All I can find on the Web is people posting for help, saying they couldn't manage it with CentOS 6 (I'm using CentOS 7), and being recommended to compile it themselves, but running into dependency hell.
I tried myself; when I realised I was running into difficulty building libpano13 so I could install libpano13-devel so I could compile Hugin itself, I knew I'd gone out of my depth. (And now my yum repository is screwed because I was installing non-CentOS 7 versions of other packages just to try and get Hugin to build.)
I'm furious. I don't want to doing this kind of stuff at home; I just want software to work either out of the box, or following a simple set of instructions on the Web. But now it looks like a piece of software I use all the time is completely uninstallable, and there's nothing I can do about it. I'm half tempted to go back to the latest version of Fedora, but I really don't want to have to waste a second Sunday (I don't have time for the job any other day of the week, and sometimes not even on Sunday) doing that!
I don't suppose by any chance there's anyone reading this who's managed to get Hugin or an equivalent photo-stitching program running under CentOS, is there?
