RPM 5.0 released

RPM is a powerful and mature command-line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating Unix/Linux software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, and the like. [ For a short introduction to using RPM check out this guide ].

Exactly 12 months back, I had posted the good news of plans to revamp RPM.

New features in RPM 5.0

• The Automake/Autoconf/Libtool-based build environment of RPM was completely revamped from scratch.
• Configuration is now through RPM macros during run time instead of through rpmrc.
• The RPM code base was ported to all major platforms, including the BSD, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X Unix flavors and Windows/Cygwin.
• RPM packages now also support LZMA compression apart from Gzip and Bzip2.
• RPM is now able to automatically track vendor distribution files with its new vcheck(1) based "%track" section and now can automatically download the vendor distribution files too. (Does this translate to automatic dependency resolution ?)
  

Read the official press release here.

Ubuntu sources.list online generator

I have faced a number of times the prospect of entering the web address of the online repositories just because I some how tampered the contents of the sources.list file which is residing in /etc/apt/ location. Agreed, it is not difficult to fire up ones favorite editor and enter a bunch of lines by hand. But then it would be nice to have a tool which creates the code to be entered in your sources.list file automatically.

More specifically if the tool resides online, you can access it anywhere. Enter the Ubuntu sources.list online generator. The USP of this unique online tool is that you can create your own custom sources.list from various available sources and it takes only two simple steps.

So next time you are faced with re-building your sources.list file in Ubuntu, visit the Ubuntu sources.list generator and populate your sources.list file.

Related articles :
Using netselect-apt - Tip to select the fastest Debian mirror.
A Concise apt-get / dpkg primer - For new Debian users.
A list of Ubuntu/Kubuntu repositories