First Day, First Question
 

Hey guys ....

First day in the open source community and let me say im loving linux :) .. currently on mandrake after a failed debian install i have a couple of questions if thats ok :) ...

1) RPM's ... i undertsnad theyre a form or compression but "uncompressing" them requires a number of letters eg "-ivh"... what does that mean ?? -- also im getting dependency errors when unrpming :p some files ... is that because ivh doesnt work for all files ??


.... hmm i have alot more but will post them slowly as i work out how to put them in words :) .. thanks ... help is appreciated

running a rpm is sort of like installing program in windows. Mandrake may just let you double click them from a explorer and install them graphically.

If you prefer the command line, type man rpm or google/linux and earch, it'll let you knwo what all of those flags do. the man program works for most commands in linux. EX:

man ls
man aumix

you get the idea.

nathan

thanks mate :) ... ill check google/linux ... forgot all about it :) ....

-i
Install the package

-v
To be verbose

-h
Prints out hash marks while instlling


-i -v -h
or
-ivh

FYI
RPM - Redhat Package Manager
http://www.rpm.org/

I just double-click the RPM and let Mandrake's graphical installer do it for me. :)

I used to make it that way, but you get to see lots more info on console which for me is a step backwards... we should be able to see the same if not much more on the graphical version of RPM.