Newbie here. I’m running Red Hat , and the intention is to make the computer system as organised as possible.
I have tried not to fall into the “trap” of installing a rag-bag of programs to suit my quest-of-the-moment.
I am trying to install programs that I use, into dedicated directories; expanding scope by editing the PATH variable.
This seems to work for standalone programs with very specific uses.
However, I recently tried to install software from SourceForge in order to access a new hardware device, and this led to very complicated and time-consuming chase, hunting for “odd” files here and there to satisfy dependencies… My ‘system’ of installing programs in dedicated directories seems to have broken down, and I am worried about making a mess, with code and subroutines all over the place on my system.
One of the dependencies I was prompted to install for the attempt in accessing the new hardware, was EPEL from Fedora.
I do not think this is “contained” in the directory in which I downloaded/ran it, and it seems to be active everywhere on the system. No bad thing, I guess, but not helpful when you want to understand exactly how and where different parts of your system operate.
So, I am thinking it might be a good idea to install Fedora in a Box , and play with that instead, at least till I understand things a little better.
However, the Box seems to be rather unstable and also quite slow, based on output to the screen. (Blinking, and taking sometimes many seconds to respond)
How useful do you think the Boxes are, and what are the tips to set up correctly, for example, should one use a ‘minimal’ variant of Fedora ?