Greetings.  We've just installed what we believe to be SL 3.0.3 for AMD
on a dual-Opteron system here.  (We "believe" because the manufacturer,
Penguin, sent us the CD's; we didn't download the ISO's ourselves.  It
certainly LOOKS like 64-bit software, and we did reinstall the OS from
scratch ourselves.)

We have a number of Opteron systems, but the others are running RHEL.

There seem to be 36 "duplicated" packages on this system.  For instance:

[root]# rpm -qa | grep samba-3.0.9-1.3E.1
samba-3.0.9-1.3E.1
samba-3.0.9-1.3E.1

We also see the same general kinds of duplication on a dual-Opteron
system running RHEL 3.0.3 WS.  Perhaps this reflects the installation of
both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of some packages?  (But I don't know why
we'd see that with Samba, for instance.)

In any case, we seem to be able to use yum to apply updates to the
system, but using apt-get gives us pages and pages of error messages.
See the appended for a sample of both.

Thus, I have two questions: (1) why, exactly, do we have the duplicated
packages?  (2) Why does yum work but apt not?

Thanks.

                                        - Mike


Appendix: apt-get failure, yum success
======================================

[root]# apt-get update
Get:1 ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org 303/x86_64/apt-rpm release [1064B]
Fetched 1064B in 0s (1419B/s)
Hit ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org 303/x86_64/apt-rpm/os pkglist
Hit ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org 303/x86_64/apt-rpm/os release
Hit ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org 303/x86_64/apt-rpm/updates pkglist
Hit ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org 303/x86_64/apt-rpm/updates release
Hit ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org 303/x86_64/apt-rpm/contrib pkglist
Hit ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org 303/x86_64/apt-rpm/contrib release
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done

[root]# apt-get upgrade
Reading Package Lists...
Building Dependency Tree...
You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
   4Suite: Depends: libc.so.6()(64bit)
           Depends: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit)
           Depends: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3)(64bit)
   Canna-libs: Depends: libc.so.6()(64bit)
               Depends: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit)
   ElectricFence: Depends: libc.so.6()(64bit)
                  Depends: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit)
                  Depends: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3)(64bit)
.
.     [...literally thousands of lines...]
.
=================================================================

[root]# yum upgrade
Gathering header information file(s) from server(s)
Server: SL 303 errata
Server: SL 303 main
Finding updated packages
Downloading needed headers
Finding obsoleted packages
Resolving dependencies
.Dependencies resolved
I will do the following:
[update: compat-db 4.0.14-5.x86_64]
[update: compat-db 4.0.14-5.i386]
I will install/upgrade these to satisfy the dependencies:
[deps: compat-libstdc++ 7.3-2.96.128.i386]
[deps: tcl 8.3.5-92.2.i386]
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages
Getting compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96.128.i386.rpm
compat-libstdc++-7.3-2.96 100% |=========================| 1.0 MB    00:01
Getting compat-db-4.0.14-5.x86_64.rpm
compat-db-4.0.14-5.x86_64 100% |=========================| 3.7 MB    00:03
Getting tcl-8.3.5-92.2.i386.rpm
tcl-8.3.5-92.2.i386.rpm   100% |=========================| 699 kB    00:01
Getting compat-db-4.0.14-5.i386.rpm
compat-db-4.0.14-5.i386.r 100% |=========================| 3.4 MB    00:04
Running test transaction:
Test transaction complete, Success!
tcl 100 % done 1/4
compat-libstdc++ 100 % done 2/4
compat-db 100 % done 3/4
compat-db 100 % done 4/4
Updated:  compat-db 4.0.14-5.x86_64 compat-db 4.0.14-5.i386
Dep Installed:  compat-libstdc++ 7.3-2.96.128.i386 tcl 8.3.5-92.2.i386
Transaction(s) Complete

--
Michael Hannon            mailto:[log in to unmask]
Dept. of Physics          530.752.4966
University of California  530.752.4717 FAX
Davis, CA 95616-8677