FreshRPMs and Livna Join Forces

If you use Fedora and you want to be able to do useful things like play MP3s or DVDs you need to add an external repository like FreshRPMs or Livna.  This is because MP3 playback is covered by patents in the United States, libdecss may be illegal to distribute, and a license agreement is required to playback DVDs.  Ever since I tried Debian, I liked their way of doing things.  The nonfree packages are in the official repos; they’re just disabled by default.

So when I started using Fedora five years ago, I was told to add the FreshRPMs repo to get MP3 playback.  Later I discovered that some of the packages I wanted were in Livna.  However, FreshRPMs and Livna packagers had a long-standing fued.  Because of this, and the fact that they had overlapping packages, users’ lives were made very difficult.  If you wanted the mutually exclusively packages you needed to have both repos enabled to install the packages you wanted, but you had to disable one of them when it came to updates.  Otherwise the packages they had in common would trample over each other and cause you problems.

However, for the good of the Fedora users, they have finally teamed up in the form of RPM Fusion.  (This teamup also includes Dribble - a repository for video game emulators)  A few weeks ago, everyone started mentioning on the Fedora mailling list that an RPM Fusion repo had been installed and that it had been responsible for updating packages formerly handled by FreshRPMs and Livna.  I found this was also happening on my system.  When I looked into it I was very pleased to find out they had finally put their differences aside and teamed up for the good of Fedora users.  This will end up causing a lot fewer headaches and allow us to make our systems do what we need it to.

• Freshrpms
• Livna
• Repositories