Could someone please explain RPM

[QuickSilver]

I can find all the info on RPM commands and all that, but nobody tells you where you are even supposed to enter the commands. Just installing a video driver is turning into a big ordeal. Help!

[bailey]

its normally done with the rpm manager
should be as simple as useing winzip

[QuickSilver]

Do you know where to download it? I have yet to find a source.

[bailey]

its usally a part of linux, which one you useing,
red hat and mandrake are the ones I have used so far

[neouser99]

which linux distribution are you using....rpm's will not work with all of them.

redhat, slack, suse, fedora, are a few that use rpm.

mandrake, gentoo, debian, don't to name a few.

anyway, commands for rpm management go either in the rpmmanager like said above, or you can use the cli (command line interface) to access the commands. that is all the rpmmanager does, just in pretty GUI

-neo

[QuickSilver]

Fedora Core 2.

[neouser99]

ok, well, it is a package managment system. All apps in linux usually require a whole bunch of different dependencies (usually libraries of some sort): language, graphics, system commands, etc. rpm's check to make sure that all the dependencies (this is where dependency hell comes from) are present and uptodate, at least to the point that they can run. if they aren't uptodate, the package management will let you know

also, by using package management, you can update it later easily, instead of having to rebuild, compile, etc. or delete it. rpm's would i guess be the equivalent of windows installers. one last thing i didn't mention, if the package already exists, and is a newer version then before, it won't overwrite it, so there is library protection involved.

Also, rpms are very easy to manipulate, and add dependencies. www.rpmfind.net has a lot of rpms. if you get the fedora core 2 gaim rpm...it assumes that you have stock fedora core 2. so if gaim has some dependencies that aren't in the original fedora core 2, it will install them for you, then install gaim.

-neo

i might have missed something, let me know if there are more questions.

[QuickSilver]

I tried to download a graphics driver in an RPM format, and when I try to open it, all it does is say that there is no program associated with that file type.

[neouser99]

graphics driver??? what do you mean??? the kernel didn't recognize your video card on installation?

what is the exact name of the file??

where on rpmfind did you get it, could we have the link?

-neo

[QuickSilver]

It found my video card without any problem, but ATI has a driver for linux, so i was going to try to use that. I just downloaded it from their driver section at the website.

[neouser99]

all you should have to do is run this command from the terminal:

rpm -Fvh /path/to/package.rpm

that will give you some progress bars, and stuff like that.

-neo