[GTALUG] XFCE on regular Red Hat

[Sergio Durigan Junior]

On Friday, July 24 2015, David Collier-Brown wrote:

> For a long time, I've been using the Fedora XFCE spin, but wanted to
> build a new for-work dev machine and got RHEL 7.2, so I would have a
> supported version to host recent tools on.

I think you meant RHEL-7.1, right?  RHEL-7.2 has not been released yet.

> Fedora is fun, but tends to lag in app versions while being at the
> bleeding edge in kernel versions, which is fine for a toy machine, but
> the inverse of what I want for a machine to make money with..
> 86_64 GNU/Linux

Out of curiosity, why do you say that Fedora "tends to lag in app
version"?  The Linux kernel and the GNU toolchain are well maintained
and up-to-date; popular desktop programs as well, at least in my
experience.

> Alas, RHEL 7.2  seems to be much *more* broken than Fedora fc 21
> Yum can't even do a groupinstall,

Do you mean yum does not recognize the "groupinstall" command at all?
As you have mentioned below, yum actually *can* do a groupinstall
without problems.

> and half the required packages for
> xfce are in neither the Red Hat nor the EPEL repositories.

You have to enable the 'optional' and 'extras' repositories on RHEL-7 in
order to get the necessary dependencies for EPEL packages.  Take a look
at:

  <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL>

> Building XFCE from scratch exposes even more missing dependencies

Building from scratch may depend on other packages indeed, depending on
the features you enable while configuring.

> This seems odd, as many people with slightly earlier 7.X releases did
> $ sudo yum install epel-release
> $ sudo yum groupinstall "X Window system"
> $ sudo yum groupinstall xfce
> and were done.

I tested it here on a pristine RHEL-7.1, and all I needed to do was
installing the EPEL repository and 'yum groupinstall Xfce' worked fine.

> Is this just a bad release, or has RH been degrading while I was using
> something else?

No, Red Hat has not been degrading anything.  However, you might take
into consideration that RHEL is an Enterprise GNU/Linux edition, and as
such its goal is to be as stable as possible while still offering
important upstream features to the customers.

Red Hat does not package XFCE for any version of RHEL; such packages
have always been considered "third-party" and provided by EPEL (at least
some of them).

> Should I downgrade to 6? Use KDE? Switch to a different distro?

You do not need to downgrade to RHEL-6 to get XFCE working.  Using EPEL
is more than enough for this.

Cheers,

-- 
Sergio
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