Installing rpm's that are not from RHN

[Rick Stevens]

On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 12:25 -0600, Hamilton, David wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I was wondering if downloading rpms and installing from a site such as
> http://www.alsa-project.org/ posed any risk to a RHEL desktop computer?
> The past several kernels the module for my sound card (CS4236) has been
> left out. The only way to correct the issue is to go to alsa org and
> download the files and go through the steps. Is the above site a
> "trusted" site to RHEL users or would I be better off not trusting any
> files unless they come from RHN? I searched and the RHN doesn't seem to
> have the files needed.

Installing "foreign" RPMs won't harm the machine.  You should, however,
download Alsa's GPG key and make sure the RPMs you do download have the
same GPG key.  You should also be aware that up2date will NOT
automatically check for updates from Alsa.  You'll have to do that
manually.  It would also be of benefit if you could tell us which
version of RHEL you were running.

I find it weird that the CS4236 is not supported in the newer kernels.
Are you certain that support for that card hasn't been rolled into
another driver so that the new driver handles multiple cards?  If you're
sure that didn't occur, you should squawk your concerns to bugzilla so
RH can put the support back in.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-     If you can't beat your computer at chess...try kickboxing!     -
----------------------------------------------------------------------