peter bay-jespersen wrote: > (newbie-ish): I am trying to learn more about linux (Mdk 8.1) by > (install:) deselecting everything and looking at what remains. So far > that means reading & hand-writing the little package descriptions. But > even so, there are so many! writers cramp strikes! Is there any way I > could access/print all the little package descriptions, under Win 98se > ? (i.e., pre-install) If not, what extra packages would i need to > install besides above minimum to do this, and where & how to find the > descriptions, once linux up and running?
hmmm. rpm -qi <packagename> will give you the information you're looking for in linux. <packagename> can be '*' which will just give you all the info from all the packages on a cd say. Or, if you want to get info about all the installed packages use "rpm -qai". I can't think of an easy way to dump them all in win98. There might be a program to do it, but I know very little about windows these days. www.rpmfind.net has the information you want but you can't just dump it in one fell swoop. In answer to your question, just the base mandrake install is enough to get rpm to dump all the information about all the packages on the distro CDs. A nicer way to go might be rpmdrake. You load it up and by default it knows about all the install CDs. You click on package names and it gives you the description of the package in a frame on the right. If you like it there is a checkbox to the right of the package which you can tick. Once you've finished selecting packages you click "install/remove" and it will find dependencies and prompt you for the install CDs it needs to complete the installation. As a sidenote I found it was a good way to work at the workshop on saturday. It meant that if installations were going to fail they would fail sooner (saves time) and meant people could customise the software on their box without having to know what the software was called (there's a search thingo as well). HTH James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
