[ILUG] Installing software on Linux (Specifically Fedora core 3)

[David Gourdelier]

Hello,

> I want to use VIM as the text editor (no particular reason apart from Vi
> then VIM where the editors I started with) was reading about Kvim and
> decided to give it a run to evaluate (This partly because the version of
> VIM included with Fedora seems a bit limited). So I go to
> http://www.freehackers.org/kvim/ and take a download of the RPM.  They
> do talk about Yzis but lets not go there yet!  This gives a dependency
> of /usr/bin/nawk and libGLcore.so.1 and neither seems to be available
> for download. So a couple of  hours wasted there!

I don't know about KVim and Fedora but I think you should ask the Kvim
team for help.
 
> I was working away with the Java and came across JEdit Thinking this was
> worth a look at downloaded it extracted it and there was an install
> script so went with it but it is looking for switches but there is no
> indication of which does what.  going through the extract I noticed
> documentation such as installation.txt and general.html going into
> /usr/share/jedit-4.2/doc but when I go to find the said
> /usr/share/jedit4-2 to is not there!!!!  More time wasted!

Did you try /usr/share/jedit ? Maybe the files your are looking for
are on their website ? Maybe you can download the sources and look for
these files inside ?
 
> I really think software installation is the biggest issue that is
> holding Linux back.   I do appreciate that packages have to be such they
> are available (for example) in a format accessible by all the distros
> and switches are for configuration and so on but as in the case the
> software was only going on for a "look see" as both packages may or may
> not be fit for the purpose I have in mind it most certainly did not
> justify the time and effort put into it.  On the other hand either or
> both might have been exactly what was required and therefore I lose out!

I agree that software installation is a big issue for Linux. I didn't
use rpm for a few years but from what I remember at this time, the RPM
installation was bringing lot of problems (differents distros using
the same format, no easy update, lot of third party software not
included in the distro but in external archives). I found Debian to
have less problems in this regard.

> So;
> 
> 2. Is there anything actually better (easier) than KVim or JEdit.  The
> former for editing Java Files and the Latter as a graphical environment
> for Java development

I use Eclipse and I found it to be a very nice IDE. It's stable, fast
(for this kind of tool), open-source, it can do many things with a
simple mouse click (the refractor and search management are a must).
Besides it has lot of plugins and it's becoming more and more the
standard Java programmer IDE.

The install is easy, you only need to have GTK installed. It installs
itself into only one directory.

-- 
  David Gourdelier