[CONSPIRE] Installing software from source on Linux?

[Dan Bikle]

People,

I fiddled around with my whitebox last night for 3 hours.

Yum wasn't installed so I had to do it by hand.

I did not find the Yum install all that easy.

Once I did get it installed, with all the Python files
in the right place (some of which I had to install manaually),
it hawked up a Python exception while I was trying to
yum install emacs.

So, then I tried installing apt-get.
for that I tried using rpm -Uhv on a variety
of things from a repository I found via google.

I fiddled with rpm and wget for 30 minutes trying to go get
everything I needed to install apt-get.

I'm not a patient man so I quit that effort.

Then I entered a ticket to wipe my whitebox clean and
put FreeBSD on there.

I'll let you know how that goes.

Question: if you had a choice between FreeBSD 5.3 and 5.4
what would you pick?
I'm leaning towards 5.4 since the FreeBSD site says that it
contains bug fixes and enhancements.

-Dan