Friday, May 14, 2010

How to set Smart Package Manager on PCLinuxOS

Smart Package Manger Version 1.2 is available for download from repositories through synaptic on PCLinuxOS 2010 . Smart is not officially used as a package manager on PCLinuxOS. This may be the reason that smart does not work by default once you install it and needs manual tweaking before it works for you and also the version is not upgraded to current 1.3 . 

Synaptic works flawlessly on PCLinuxOS so you do not need smart as an alternate. But as a personal preference to use an alternate package manager I looked into smart and followed  these simple steps to set smart for my PCLinuxOS .

1 : Setting of Mirrors

 Click " Edit" on  smart GUI , locate " Mirrors" and click that to open a new window where you can set your primary and alternate mirrors according to your choice . 

2 : Setting Channels 

Once again click " Edit " on smart GUI , locate " Channels " which will open a new window for setting channels. Everything is set by default, you need to change few things. 

a ) Set the priority  from 0 to 10 both on " rpm-sys " and on the selected mirror " apt-rpm " . This can be achieved by clicking properties button of the above two.

b ) Keep both the above checked and un-check any others.

Now you are all set. Either click the green curved arrow button " update channels" on smart GUI to  synchronize your system with remote repositories or run this command in shell as root

" smart update " 

Smart GUI on version 1.2 apparently freeze but keeps on working in background . Smart needs to be upgraded for which I have put a request on PCLinuxOS forum. Smart GUI is as simple as Synaptic and with little exploration one can find his/her way around it to manage packages on PCLinuxOS . Simple smart commands can be found here .

Once again a clear warning :  PCLinuxOS team does not use smart as an official package manager . 

I like smart because of my personal reasons . If you want to have smart working on your PCLinuxOS the above steps will help you to fix it. But I am not sure there will be any support from PCLinuxOS team in case you run into any problem with smart.

There is an interesting article about smart on PCLinuxOS written by  pinoc 
which is worth reading.