Hello, I'm new here, but now new in Linux.  I've been a RedHat/Fedora
user about 10 years.

The rapid turnover in Fedora made me seek out a more longlasting
distribution, now I'm testing Scientific Linux.  SL installed cleanly
for me and starts fine.

I'm having trouble getting some packages installed that we really
need.  In Fedora systems, we have been using the livna service to get
RPMS for things that Fedora won't provide, such as nvidia proprietary
video drivers.  On the SL, I tried to install the nvidia drivers at
the optional repository server, but it doesn't work as configured by
default.  I can build a new RPM for my systems, I don't think that is
trouble.  I also want to run the newest lyx, and I've found that,
after building and installing  aiksaurus, then lyx does build just
fine.  I can post those RPMs in case anybody wants them.

The application where I'm really having trouble is Gnumeric. I'm
trying to build the version that is supplied with Fedora 8, which is
gnumeric-1.6.3-12. The problem is that trying to build it leads back
into a dependency HELL.  First it wants goffice and libgda, and then
when I try to build that, it wants version of several devel packages
that are newer than the ones in SL5.  See:

error: Failed build dependencies:
        sqlite-devel >= 3.4.0 is needed by libgda-3.0.1-4SL5.x86_64
        freetds-devel is needed by libgda-3.0.1-4SL5.x86_64
        postgresql-devel is needed by libgda-3.0.1-4SL5.x86_64
        mdbtools-devel is needed by libgda-3.0.1-4SL5.x86_64
        xbase-devel is needed by libgda-3.0.1-4SL5.x86_64


I thought I might get around this by putting in the EPEL repository
that is announced on the Fedora web page
(http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/8/). That provides
extras for Enterprise Linux 5 users.  It gives me some prerequisites
for gnumeric, like goffice, but it does not give me Gnumeric.

The users here prefer Gnumeric very strongly over oocalc, mostly
because Gnumeric auto-fill characteristics more closely parallel
Excel.  I don't see much difference between the programs most of the
time.

What do you think?  How far back in time do I have to go to find a
version of Gnumeric that can be compiled under SL5?

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas