distro hopped and resulted to urpm vs. apt-get

So I got this new PC. It didn’t have an operating system installed, as what I wanted, but it had a pretty compatible specs.

At first I had my eyes on Kubuntu. It a pretty good OS, and it impressed me. I saw this OS from a friend of my, and surprisingly, everything just works for his. It had all the eye candies of a linux OS. I got it installed, and running on my new machine for a day until I tried installing it’s mp3 support. Now, from what I know this should be easy for kubuntu, I mean with all the support it gets from open source community. However, I had a problem with it. I was setting up my amarok player, untill it pompted me to install mp3 support. As a result, I got my system to hang. Now that is something that you won’t see often in a linux OS. So everytime I run my amarok now, the system just hangs. I tried installing the needed packages, but still nothing changed.

Due to this, I decided to try another OS. So I ended up with mandriva spring, and everything worked perfectly. Finally I decided to stick with this. I haven’t used mandrake for quite some time, since I was on SLED for a year, and SUSE a few years back. I’m finally comfortable with this now, and it’s still pretty easy to use.

These are one of the times when I hop distros, and yes since my hard drive was bare, I had nothing to loose.

Now, to those who are interested, mandriva is a cool linux distro. That is what I can say. Kubuntu was also good, that we all know for a fact, I just think that I didn’t get lucky with it.

I found both distros easy to use, and learned to use “urpmi” command for the first time. I used to either install an rpm, or compile from source, but I was impressed with urpm. Compared to apt-get, or apt, which is popular for it’s easy of use, and it’s capability to shield you from having dependency troubles, urpm (a user mode rpm manager) is one tool that non-debian users would surely be using. Many claimed that apt is top of the line, and maybe the most powerful package managing tool, but if you just have the right repositories, urpm will do you good.

I would proudly say that I am now a happy urpm user, I didn’t have problems installing any packages at all. So for those who fear dependency problems on linux distro, and didn’t want to go debian based, I would recommend you to use this tool.