SEARCHING SOFTWARE ( all distro's )


Last time I wrote about searching software packages for Mandrake, today we do a general round-up.

Searching for software is relatively easy in Linux because there are a few places that act like huge warehouses where all the packages can be found.

Most important resource is Freshmeat
as they have a search engine on their site that will find you any package you like, be it in tarball, .rpm, or .deb format.

Tarball is universal for all Linux distro´s ( but there is a difference between the .tar.gz format and the .tgz one that is special for Slackware and VectorLinux ) Sourceforge foundries is a good place to look.
Also the ftp sites from the specific distros have plenty of extra packages.

RPM is ¨RedHat Package Management¨ was originally developed for RedHat but today also used for Mandrake and SuSE ( most of the time there is a difference between RPMs for Mandrake or RedHat so see to it that you get the right one ) A special search engine for RPMs is: RPMfind.net

As .deb are Debian specific packages, you get them though apt-get at the Debian mirrors but also on sourceforge and freshmeat.

An enormous resource for all thats related to music and sound is the site Linux-sound.org you should really go and have a look there, it´s amazing what you can get from that site. ( no ZZ Top MP3s though, actually no music files at all, but everything to make them. )

If you are looking for a package and the Freshmeat search engine can´t find it because you do not know the name of it . . . try google/linux

More resources:
LinuxApps
Linux Games
Linux HQ
Kernel Archives
Samba
XFree
Apache
Window Managers

If after trying all this, you still do not find the software you´re after . . . . just post a topic on the All Things Linux Forum and we´ll get everybody searching for you !


Bruno


-- Jul 22 2003 ( Revised Dec 11 2005 ) --