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