Hi...I am having alot of fun learning how to use linux and reading documentations. One question..when I read some documentation and they tell me "make sure you have this and this installed". How do I check if I have it installed?

I have used the pkgtool and I know I can find alot of packages I have installed there. what if I install something via rpm? will it still show in the pkgtool? What if I installed via tar.gz?

Linux is so cool that there probably is a command to check. Can someone help me with it?

Thanks for your time,

if installed from rpm, do
rpm -qa | grep <package_name>

if you have the package_name installed , it'll show you or else it won't.

read more about this at
man rpm

regards,
vijay.

RPM may not really work with Slackware.

What you are after is pkgtool.

ok..so lets say I need to find where mozilla is installed (I do) how do I find it if I installed it by compiling it myself?

I do # find / -name mozilla and it shows me where some of the files are. Is that it? Is that everything?

bash-2.05b# find / -name mozilla
/usr/bin/mozilla
/usr/local/mozilla
/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla
bash-2.05b#

why didn't it show me the .mozilla/ in my home directory?

I have a feeling that what I need to do is rm the /usr/bin/mozilla, but I am scared of doing that. :| --total linux noob

here is exactly what I need to do:

I installed slackware 9.0 (full install). It comes with mozilla 1.3. (yuk) Now I installed 1.4b from tar.gz into /usr/local/mozilla

to launch mozilla 1.4b I have to do: /usr/local/mozilla/./mozilla
It works perfectly and I am happy with it.

How do I get rid of the 1.3

I have 1,000,000 other questions but I resist asking them because I learn more if I RTFM, but in this case I have not found it in the manuals.

thanks for your time,

If you want to remove a part of the original install, then pkgtool is the way to go. It has an option for removing packages that will list all the packages it knows about. Just select the Mozilla 1.3 package and get rid of it.

If you are compiling from source, you'll also want to check out the CheckInstall program. It replaces the make install step in compiling and updates Slackware so that your compilied program looks like a Slack pack. Checkinstall does actually install the program, but if you want to remove it later you can use tools like pkgtool.

the fun really begins when you are on an RPM based distribution ... say SuSE, and update from a tar.gz source code file, and make something yourself ... say gtk, and are happily running the new version of gtk, until you use YaST2 and it decides "hold on a minute, you need the version that shipped with SuSE" and then it installs the old version, and then you are wondering why nothing doesn't seem to work anymore.

In short, all of those tools that track what you do or don't have are worth didly squat. ./configure it and if you have what the software needs great, if it doesn't it will let you know, and then you can always worry about where to get it from.

thanks alot for your posts guys..everything is now running smoothly. This is another linux obstacle that I now don't fear.

I think I will stay away from rpm..

on my way to becomming M$ free!!: