I've just switched from Mandrake to Fedora, so I've been a Mandrake user for quite a bit and I'm familiar with their admin tools but not the ones with Fedora. So it is very possible that I am missing something or there are alternative approaches.

I've just installed FC4, x86-64 version from the DVD ISO downloaded off of BitTorrent (link was from fedora's page). But the problem is that add/remove packages that I get to from the GNOME menus will not work. Packages that I try to add (development) ask me for "CD 3," and do not accept the DVD as input (obvious there is no such thing as a CD 3 when I have a single DVD). I had hoped there was somewhere to setup repositories, but I see no options or method of configuring system-install-packages whatsoever.

Any time I try to remove a package -- any package I tried (I tried a lot), it would just bring up an error dialog saying that the given packages were not found and would have to be removed before installation can continue. The package listing seem to be the RPM names for the RPMs that would be associated with the options I am checking/unchecking. What's dumb is that it says they need to be removed but I am INSTALLING them!

Lastly, is the package list not as verbose as in Mandrake? I'm used to Mandrake's manager listing RPMs very precisely. According to what I can see in the package manager I've no development packages installed and yet I've been able to compile kernel modules with GCC. Normally gcc comes installed but almost never kernel source, so I am noob enough at this tool that I can't even see that the kernel source is installed.

If someone could explain what is going on or how am I working incorrectly with Fedora I would greatly appreciate it. I have recently heard about yum and I will try to do more research on how to use it properly, but I am a sucker for graphical tools and I'm trying to find out all of the tools after using the Mandrake set and KDE for so long.

redhat-config-packages does not allow you to choose individual packages. For me it always crashes now.

I think Mandrake still uses kpackage? kpackage comes as part of the standard kdeadmin package but is missing in Fedora kdeadmin.

I don't see any GnoRPM rpms avaliable for Fedora either...

I compiled kpackage for Fedora by compiling me a new kdeadmin RPM. I'm sorry I can't remember where I got the source, maybe kde.org.

Actually, I think I figured out what it is doing. When I select to uninstall something it tells me the list of RPMs that depend on it. I have to manually unselect those, apparently. If I unselect a set of packages such that no installed packages have dependencies, then the system-config-packages works for me. Also I've found that some packages I actually can install, but other packages it thinks are magically on different CDs.

I also figured out how to work yum, and yum works just fine. The only problem with yum is that it only uses the online repositories and so can be slower, but it also always gets the latest up-to-date packages. So when system-config-packages breaks down, I just get the package name from that tool and then issue the proper yum command.