Guest skytrain Posted October 30, 2003 Report Share Posted October 30, 2003 I have Mandrake up and running with a dual boot with Win 98, but do not know how to use RPM, despite searching the boards. Is there a tutorial somewhere? I can mount the CD and see the files that I want to browse, but do not know how to get them onto the Desktop, even after I push the Install buttons, nothing appears for selection. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtweidmann Posted October 30, 2003 Report Share Posted October 30, 2003 There is a tutorial on software installtion which covers RPMs at the old Mandrake User site: http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/index.html There are several tools which can use for installing and managing RPMs KDE and Gnome both have their own (Kpackage and Grpm from memory). These will show what is installed on your system and allow you to add/remove packages. Assuming you have one of them installed you should be able to right click on an RPM and select the open with option. The problem with RPMs is dependancies, eg to install package X you need to have already installed packages A B and C. Tools like kpackage will simply give you an error message leaving you to try and find suitable packages, this can become increasingly complicated and frustrating. So Mandrake came up with URPMI. The way it works is that it has a list of sources where it knows it can find RPMs (eg ftp site, a local directory, etc..) and it has a searchable database of all these packages on these sites. If you launch URPMI and tell it to install KDE instead of saying you don't have X installed, it will try to find X and it install it for you. The easiet way of using URPMI (at least in my opinion) is through the Mandrake Control Centre. Under the software tab you will find tools to install/remove packages, plus a tool to manage the sources that urpmi uses. Note: The more sources URPMI has, the better the chances of it being able to find all the dependancies you need. The following link takes you to a site that will help you add the most commonly used sources. http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/ Also it is important to keep URPMI's database up to date. That means telling it to re-check the source locations every now and then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ezroller Posted October 30, 2003 Report Share Posted October 30, 2003 we normally have some docs that are great for understanding that. but the links appear to be down right now. you can always go into mandrake control center and install software from there. from a terminal as root: mcc or you can do: man urpmi the latter will help you learn to do it from the command prompt. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kmack Posted October 31, 2003 Report Share Posted October 31, 2003 You can also go to the rpm site and they even have a link to a Mandrake How-TO CLICK HERE for RPM HOW TO's For urpmi info try this link: CLICK HERE for urpmi faq Mandrake Update automates things but you have to setup your sources to have rpm packages available to you. On a dialup it can take several minutes to update the files and build its database before you'll see anything available to install. These plus what they have given above should help you understand it. Takes some time to get comfortable with it all, but rpm/urpm are really powerful once you learn how to use the many features. Enjoy! :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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