On 15 Feb 2008, at 3:52 pm, Joe Landman wrote:
Mark Hahn wrote:
whats everyones take on centos as a cluster os.
works fine for me, but I also don't think distros are very important.
the critical things are:
- must have a decent package system. yum is; I'm not familiar
enough
with urpmi or apt to know them. I think both provide appropriate
management of dependencies.
Yum is good, so is apt. I still have a problem with yum wanting to
install i386 binaries as well as the x86_64 ones. Haven't learned
how to stop that yet (probably simple too).
There is much I do not like about rpm. However it has a few nice
features. I can't live without
rpm -qa
rpm -ql package
rpm -qf file
and am going through withdrawl as apt does not seem to provide these
(or if they do, it isn't at all obvious how/where).
You'll have to bear with me, since I don't know much about rpm. In
most cases there is equivalent functionality at both the dpkg level
and apt level.
rpm -qa : lists all installed packages, right?
dpkg -l
works at the dpkg level, aptitude can do the same thing:
aptitude search '~i'
I tend to use aptitude these days, and don't often touch dpkg
directly. aptitude's search expressions are odd, but quite powerful,
and allow you to do some useful things. For example, following a
sarge to etch upgrade, I wanted to remove all old sarge kernel
packages (which are called kernel-image-*), regardless of which sarge
package a machine was using, which was easily done with:
aptitude remove '~i~nkernel-image'
rpm -ql package : lists files installed by the package, right?
dpkg -L package
rpm -qf file : asks which package supplied a particular file?
dpkg -S file
Other useful Debian/Ubuntu package management commands:
apt-cache : queries the apt cache, and can report things like
dependency information. For example,
apt-cache rdepends libfoo
tells you all the packages which depend on libfoo (installed or
otherwise).
apt-file : not installed by default, but phenomenally useful - it's
dpkg -S for stuff that isn't installed yet. So if you want to ask
"what package do I need to install to supply this obscure header
file", apt-file can tell you.
Then of course there's aptitude, which is slowly replacing both apt-
get and dselect.
Tim
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