Better package manager?

Is there another package manager that i can use with AA1?
I'm particularly annoyed that there isn't any indicator that shows how fast my downloads are going and an estimate of how long it will take.
And a lack of a simple network activity monitor keeps me guessing whether its actually downloading anything or not (espescially with large downloads).
Anyone know of a simple network monitoring program, that can sit on the taskbar, that will blink when there is network activity?

 

My two cents: The progress bar works just fine.

 

You can alway ctrl + alt + del and watch the traffic in system monitor

or iftop will give you stat's on a connection.

Also xnetload http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/software/#xnetload

 

I have no problems with that it is pretty fast even on the medium speed wireless signal And I think it will be pretty tricky to change package manager and particularly its graphic interface.

 

Don't you hate it when you post about a problem you're having and half the replies are 'I don't have a problem with that'? Anyways, I did a search on 'rpm gui' and http://www.rpm.org/software/gui/ came up. I'm getting by okay with the default gui, but you might want to check out some of these alternatives.

 

When i used yum to install Skype from within a terminal session, it gave a heap of feedback, including progress bars and times remaining.

 

Yum seems to provide a fair bit of information, in a 1960's graphical way (TEXT).

 

I don't know if it's exactly what you're looking for, but you could try yumex, available through the current package manager.

 

I agree that the default package manager works, but i'm looking for something closer to ubuntu's synaptic, which for me makes a lot more sense.
Yeah, Yum is more informative, but i'm still getting used to working with the terminal. Btw, when i do yum update, i get a whole lot more updates than the one from the gui's live update. If i do these updates will it break the OS?

I'll check out all of your suggestions soon... Been busy with work work work.....

 

Yumex looks good. (http://www.yum-extender.org/wiki/Yumex)
Anyone used it before? Any known issues?

 

I think the best you can do is learn how the command line yum works (man yum from a terminal). This way you could see when it times out connecting a repository, when it's downloading or installing packages, and a progress bar for each package and a counter of the total downloaded/installed packages).

 

As I understand it, what yum does is work out the various package dependencies, and then downloads what you've asked for together with what's needed to support it. Whether all the packages that might be needed have been verified with Linpus is not clear. I guess you'll find out. One thing's for sure, though, there's little point to installing a package without its dependencies.

 

YUMEX works great. I'm using it and no problems...just type from terminal, yum install yumex

 

I'd say use Smart package manager.

What it has over Yum/Yumex type package managers - it doesn't update your repositories every single bleepin time you run the app, it allows you to lock files (like yumex but without additional plugins), view files that are installed by the application and a ton of other useful stuff. it also runs from command line the same way yum does.

To install, look for smart and smart-gui. I always use this on all rpm based operating systems

 

I go back and forth between smart and yum. By the way, to answer the question a few posts above, yes, if you do yum update at this point, it will probably break some things. Acer has a lot of customized items that will conflict.

However, to install individual packages, yum is probably the most convenient way to do it.

Note (there is a note about this elsewhere on the forums) that you should first do
yum -y update fedora-release

(This will, among other things, import a new GPG key--it's alright to accept it.)

 

I try Yumex, and is good, but after some problems that SMART was able to fix I preferred this one.