Ryan Kawailani Ozawa wrote:
I'd love to use urpmi and RPM... if you can bear with me and explain exactly
what that is! Is it automated versioning or whatever like CVS?
I take it maybe you're used to some unixy system? RPMs are similar to
windows installers. Somebody takes the sourcecode, compiles it for a
given linux distro, zips it up, then puts it into an rpm. It is like a
zip file with some extra scripting to handle upgrades and stuff. An rpm
will not work on a system drastically different from the one it was
compiled for. So you would look for mandrake 9 rpms (redhat 6.2 rpms
probably won't work, as they rely on older libraries etc.).
To deal with rpms, you must first find one. Writers of certain programs
make their own rpms, and mandrake keeps a big database of their own. A
mirror here at USC is
http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mandrake/9.2/i586/Mandrake/
. Out there, videl.ics.hawaii.edu doesn't seem to mirror mandrake
anymore. http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/macromedia/site_ucsc.html has the
flash rpm. just grab the download for mandrake. Warren was talking
about a thunderbird rpm from mandrake, but I can't find a firefox one.
You can get firefox from Mandrake cooker (beta) at
http://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/linux/distributions/mandrake-devel/cooker/i586/Mandrake/RPMS2/mozilla-firefox-0.8-14mdk.i586.rpm
. So go ahead and download the mozilla-firefox*.rpm and the flash
plugin rpm.
Then you need to install those. To do that, just open a terminal and type
rpm -Uvh mozilla-firefox*.rpm
rpm -Uvh flash*.rpm
And that's it in a nutshell. For more information on rpm, type 'man
rpm' or 'rpm --help'.
As for urpmi, it automatically finds, downloads, and installs rpms for
you. Refer to http://urpmi.org for information. Use their easyurpmi
tool to add mirrors in your urpmi configuration. You may want to add
plf, since it has all the cool stuff with questionable licenses, such as
gameboy emulators, windows media player codecs, cable descramblers, etci.
-Eric Hattemer
