apt problems

[Panu Matilainen]

On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 11:55 -0600, Matt Selvidge wrote:
> I have just recently started using Fedora core 3 and have been having
> problems doing the updates.  My friend suggested using apt and synaptic
> which he showed me and I like alot.  My problem is the copy that i
> downloaded seems to have a problem (or more likely I did it wrong) i got the
> program installed but when I run apt-get update it doesn't get the update
> files.  It doesnt seem to know where the correct repoitories are.  I did a
> little research on a forum and they suggested some files to edit and it will
> find some things now but I still cannot do core updates.  Am I forgetting a
> step or could there be another place to get the file from that would be a
> better version.  The file name is  "apt-0.5.15cnc6-11.i386.rpm".  I got it
> from "http://download.fedora.us/fedora/fedora/3/i386/rpms.extras/".  My
> friend has it installed and it works just fine but we dont know where he got
> his file from.  Any help would be appriciated because I am very new to linux
> but I like it and want to start using fedora all the time.

Start with reporting the actual errors you are seeing, otherwise it's
hard to help. :) There's one known issue currently - if you use the
mirror-selector you'll get warnings about source indexes not being found
when running "apt-get update", somewhat like this:
W: Release file did not contain checksum information for
http://fedora.quicknet.nl/fedora/fedora/3/i386/base/srclist.os
W: Release file did not contain checksum information for
http://fedora.quicknet.nl/fedora/fedora/3/i386/base/srclist.updates
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
E: Some index files failed to download, they have been ignored, or old
ones used instead.

Those are harmless (if annoying) and can be fixed by commenting out the
rpm-src lines from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mirror-select.list file. The
problem isn't so much in the package itself, it's just that the
repositories don't have the source indexes at all. 

Another option is to disable the mirror-update thing alltogether like
Bernd suggested. Using apt from eg freshrpms.net is of course a
possibility but non-extras apt packages miss all sorts of functionality
which you get from the FE apt, like automatic kernel updates.

	- Panu -