Heather, No thickness or slowness is evident. Your willingness to ask "simple" questions is I am sure appreciated by many readers of this list.
Anyway... The great thing about RPMs is that they know what to do with themselves. I find the easiest way to deal with them is to download to my home drectory and then in a console do the following: rpm -ivh name-of-app.rpm The ivh means: Install Verbose Hash Install is obvious. Verbose means tell me what you are doing. Hash means to print out 50 hash marks indicating progress. If you are upgrading a package rather than installing it the first time, substitute a "U" (uppercase) for the "i". (Note: NEVER do this if installing a kernel). One other useful tip is for when you are installing a number of packages which depend on each other. Rather than trying to sort out which to install first, just put them all in a directory, cd to it and say: rpm -ivh * or rpm -Uvh * if upgrading. The U option will be the same as "i" if the package was not previously installed BTW. Now - it worked, but where did it go? The answer - it depends. You knew that didn't you? ;-) Usually it will end up with the executable in /usr/bin, which will be on your path. First thing to try is to log in as a normal user (you did the RPM thing as root of course) and type the app's name in a console. If this works, you know you are looking for a binary of that name in a directory on your path (probably /usr/bin). If it's a GUI app and you would like to make an icon for it, do this in KDE or something similar in other environments: right click on the desktop click on "Create New" click on "Link to Application" click on the "Execute" tab click on "Browse" find your app and select it click on the "General" tab replace the words "Link to Application" with whatever name you would like to appear under your icon click on the gear icon and select something appropriate (or not) click OK Now you should be able to execute your new app by clicking on the icon. Finally, there is also a more scientific method find the files. After you have installed the rpm, use the command: rpm -ql package-name this will list all the files, including directories. Sometimes it can be tricky working out what the package name really was. rpm -qa | grep first-part-of-name can be useful here. The qa is query all, which by itself gets you a complete list of all RPMs installed. The "| grep ..." bit pipes the output of the query into grep and searches for the characters you typed. Here's an example: $ rpm -qa | grep kernel kernel-2.4.8-26mdk kernel-source-2.4.8-26mdk kernel-doc-2.4.8-26mdk kernel-2.4.8-34.1mdk kernel-headers-2.4.8-26mdk HTH Brian On Thu, 2002-03-07 at 09:17, Heather Reed wrote: > Hi again > Sorry to be asking all these stupid questions. I uninstalled gaim from software >manager, and downloaded a newer version, which I have stored in my root directory. >However, I can't get either software manager or package manager to find it (KDE). In >package manager I set /rrot/ as a search path, but still nothing. I tried to install >it by clicking on the icon, and it went through an install procedure, telling me it >had been installed successfully, but there is no icon for it, so if it has installed, >I don't know where it is! I know I am still mentally in windows, so have probably >done something wrong :-(( So - when I download rpms from the net, where do I put them >so that they can be seen by package manager or software manager, or alternatively, >how do I know the right directory to install them to using the console or whatever is >needed? > Once again, apologies for being a bit thick and slow :-)) > Heather
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