Red Hat 6.2 question

[Red Hat]

Is there a program or tutorial that helps you upgrade KDE, qt, gtk etc.. in Red Hat 6.2?

[Tyr-7BE]

With Red Hat, your choices are either plain old tar.gz (tried, tested, true...my personal fav), or RPMs. Go to the individual webpages for instructions on how to upgrade, but try getting the RPM versions of the files. It's possible to point-and-click your way to happiness that way :) The big problem you'll have with RPMs are dependencies though. tar.gz doesn't have this problem.
As for easy programs to do it, nope. That's what linux really needs to get a foot in the door of the desktop world, but it doesn't exist yet.

[Red Hat]

Thanks for the reply.

I am just a bit scared because I tried to upgrade gtk a while ago, and the system wouldn't start.
I couldn't reinstall, so I had to format my HHD again.

Red Hat 7.0 doesn't work well with my video, and Drake is ghay IMHO.

Is Slackware similar to Red Hat?
Like would it have a choice to start with KDE etc..?
Does FreeBSD have a GUI login choice?

[Tyr-7BE]

Slack is whatever you want to make it. It doesn't have RPMs, but it has a different package management system. Supposedly it's very nice to tinker with and highly customizable. I'd recommend it even though I've never tried it.
Here's the problem I've noticed with Red Hat and Mandrake (BTW, RH and Drake are IDENTICAL...just the colours are different). When a version of either one is released, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. It has the latest and greatest software, all the toys, and anything a user could ever dream of wanting, all cutting-edge and current. The problem with that is that it's all designed to work together. Now if you want to upgrade some software from version 1.02 to 1.03, that's usually not much of a problem. But let's say that you want to upgrade from KDE 1.X to KDE 2.X. Chances are pretty good that this will require some updated library files. Well these updated library files will clash with the old library files, and in order to update, the old ones must be removed. But since the original system was designed to work smoothly and beautifully with the old ones, everything that had anything even remotely to do with the old lib files will spit the new ones out like a bad potato. I tried upgrading to glibc2.2 from 2.1. I couldn't start X, and had to re-install 2.1 from RPMs. RH and Drake work like a freakin dream if you don't touch them whatsoever, or at least leave the major libs alone. Once you start screwing around with the lib files, then they become like any other broken distro, and require a good deal of know-how to fix.
My recommendation...if you're really looking to upgrade all that stuff, go for RH 7. I've heard rave reviews about it, and if there was a piece of hardware supported in 6.2, it's probably (read: definately) supported in 7.x...just give it a little exploration :) If you're wanting to try Slack, give it a go. It's one of the more advanced distros out there, but one of the better ones too. Good luck :)

<edit>I don't know much about FreeBSD except that it has a pretty big fan base and it's supposed to be very nice indeed. The GUI login is an X feature, and FreeBSD can run X, so I assume that a GUI login is a possibility.

[ 24 March 2001: Message edited by: Tyr-7BE ]