I was in doubt about writing this article. There are several tutorials covering this topic but I want to try to write a simple article that shows the basis of rpm usage. So this is not an advanced tutorial but a document for the impatient and the people that performs simple operations with rpm.

RPM, the history

RPM is an acronym for Red Hat Package Manger. As the name said, it was developed by Red Hat, but nowadays it is used by many other distributions. In fact, RPM is part of the Linux Standard Base, an attempt of standardization in the Linux world. RPM can run under several platforms like AmigaOS, BeOS, Solaris and others.

There are other package managers. Debian uses .deb packages and Gentoo uses the portage, a clone of the FreeBSD ports collection. The last one is especially efficient when installing software from source code. And the .pbi attempt from the PC-BSD project is another interesting approach specially to solve the problem with dependencies.

It is possible that RPM is not the best package manager in the world (I hope nobody from Red Hat is reading this…) but it can be as efficient and easy as some of the above.

Version 2 of Ravi's Mind Map of Linux distributions. 

 

You may download the high resolution PNG format of the mind map file here (File size: 206 KB).

One of the secrets to making any software work well is knowing what to do when it won't work at all. Firefox is no different: If you know how to isolate, identify, and cure the most common problems, you can get back to surfing without missing a beat.

But we'll get to that in a minute. The first step to avoiding trouble with Firefox is to keep it updated with the latest security patches and bug fixes. Thanks to a new auto-update feature in Firefox 1.5, keeping Firefox up to date is much quicker and easier than in earlier versions. You no longer have to reinstall the whole browser every time Mozilla releases a security patch or a minor bug-fix update.

Using the options you'll find under the Update tab in the Advanced section of the Firefox Options menu, you can configure Firefox to download and install approved Mozilla updates automatically, or (the default option) instruct the browser simply to tell you when updates are available. The auto-update feature will even check for updates to your Firefox extensions, themes, and search engine plugins.

Complete Article 

Until KDE 3.5, when a KDE release was frozen in preparation to be released, new features, and new user-visible text (strings) were not allowed in the later releases in the series, in order to make sure that no new bugs were introduced and no translations were broken. For KDE 3.5 this has been changed slightly.

Since the KDE 4.0 development cycle will take longer than usual due to the scope of the changes and improvements being undertaken, the developers want KDE 3.5.x to be the best possible KDE for users in the meantime. Therefore, KDE 3.5.1 and 3.5.2 not only fixed a lot of bugs (see 3.5.1-fixes and 3.5.2-fixes), but the developers were also allowed to change some strings in KDE so that many usability-improvements and updates in documentation found their way into KDE 3.5.x.

More from Kde.news