Grrr, CentOS!
Sunday, February 8th, 2015 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manI'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the end of the Fedora 19 support cycle when Firefox started refusing to play videos because the Flash plugin was out-of-date.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?
no subject
Date: 2015-02-08 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-09 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-02-09 02:23 pm (UTC)And if you dread upgrading your OS and put it off until it's inevitable, you of course become part of the problem of a very fragmented user base. (Says the person afraid to upgrade to 10.10 because the last time it turned my computer into a brick by setting my only account to a standard user and leaving me without admin access to my machine).
no subject
Date: 2015-02-09 08:32 pm (UTC)Well, if I stuck with Fedora, I'd just have to put up with an afternoon's reinstallation every thirteen months, and that's all. I have the tinkering needed to get the environment I want all sorted out; just copy and paste these commands after reinstalling. That's why I don't want to switch to other, more home-user oriented distros of Linux, because half these commands would no longer work. It's just the inconvenience of having to reinstall every thirteen months.
And if you dread upgrading your OS and put it off until it's inevitable, you of course become part of the problem of a very fragmented user base.
Well, it got more-or-less forced on me this time. (Effectively: Install a new OS, or switch to Chrome and forget about security updates.)
Says the person afraid to upgrade to 10.10 because the last time it turned my computer into a brick by setting my only account to a standard user and leaving me without admin access to my machine).
Couldn't you get in with a rescue disk or something? (It's how I'd do it on Linux; but I know nothing about Macs.)