title: More video fun: Rethinking RPMS link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/more-video-fun-rethinking-rpms/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 573 created: 2008/01/24 17:02:08 created_gmt: 2008/01/24 17:02:08 comment_status: open post_name: more-video-fun-rethinking-rpms status: publish post_type: post

More video fun: Rethinking RPMS

When it comes to 3rd party software, and even hardware drivers, for Linux, I’ve had a fair degree of luck with 3rd party rpms. Looks like my luck finally ran out.

Awhile ago I experimented with using a 3rd party rpm for my video card vendor’s driver (nvidia). Some time later I noticed I wasn’t getting some must-have feature, so I reinstalled the driver using the vendor’s proprietary setup. Of course I still didn’t get the feature I wanted.

Last night, after mucking around with /etc/X11/xorg.conf for awhile, I noticed my X server crashed every time libGL got called. Initially I tried force reinstalling all the mesa packages, but that didn’t work. Out of desperation I re-ran the video card vendor’s installer and noted it found several problems with my configuration — in particular that a link to libGL.so.1 didn’t exist where it should. The installer said it corrected this and other defects and reported all was now well.

Bringing back up X, I found that libGL dependant functions performed without error.

The moral of the story? When it comes to proprietary software, especially hardware drivers, from now on I’m going to favor the vendor’s recommended packages, even if it means running something out of a .tar.gz archive, over the 3rd party repos.

For some things I’ve been able to roll my own rpms. The ndiswrapper config script includes an option to build an rpm, for example. Where the vendor doesn’t provide either an rpm or a way to build one from their source, I’ll stick with whatever installer they do provide.

Hopefully I won’t have to do another system rebuild soon. The problems I’ve been having with Firefox might require it, though.

It just proves the old adage. “All operating systems suck. Some just less than others”.

Note: Just an aside. Back when I was still running genuine Red Hat Workstation, before I’d discovered CentOS and all the 3rd party yum repositories out there, I didn’t think anything at all of compiling the stuff I needed from source or using vendor-supplied binaries. In fact one of the reasons I decided to stick with Red Hat was because of the positive experiences I had getting things to compile on it from source. Back then I was even a little dismissive of rpm packaged components, considering them often too outdated and plain vanilla for my needs. Kind of ironic.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo