At work, I just converted my FreeBSD 4.11 box to RHEL 4.0U3.

It’s been quite a pain as I used my FreeBSD box as an IMAP server, using courier-imap, and now I have to build courier-imap for RHEL, as it doesn’t seem to be supported by Red Hat.

This is supposed to be easy – supposedly you can just download the .tar.bz2 file and then run rpmbuild -ta on it. However, this led to a few hours of resolving dependencies, fixing the completely broken gcc and g++ that came with my image, and trying to figure out how our in-house packaging tool interacts with rpm, yum, up2date, and a bazillion scattered files and directories. I also had a few diversions where I looked into getting yum and apt-get going, with the latter now seemingly working with one repository (ATrpms), but I’m afraid to use it.

I wish I could use something like Ubuntu for my desktop machine. RHEL doesn’t have the best selection of packages and I prefer apt over rpm. Hopefully, I’ll get more comfortable with it over time, but right now I’m really wishing that I had Ubuntu or Debian or Gentoo.

And now that I’ve mentioned Gentoo, I know that I’m going to get a great rant from Chris on RHEL suckage… 🙂