Hi there,

To start with, I would like to say I am a total newbie. I am trying to understand how one can install a package on Linux. I would really appreciate, first of all if someone could explain this in an abstract way, because I apply commands without knowing what I really am doing.

If I understood they are two ways of installing packages:

- Manually from Tarballs (.tar or .tar.gz)
- Automatically from RPMs (.rpm)

To start with, it is about the second one I would like to discuss:

To find and install packages I tried to use RPMDrake, on Mandrake 10.0. I went in Install Packages, could not find the software I was looking for (kopete-0.8.4) so I looked up in the search and it did not find any Kopete, only a sort of patch file.

So my first question is: Where does RPMDrake look up for packages? Internet? Data on my disk?

I went on the web page of Kopete, found no .rpm files. So I thought it would be related maybe.

Second question is: To run RPMDrake and actually find something and install a package, must there be a .rpm file available for that package?

Right now I work on the second option: Install Manually, there is another thread for that, it has not been any more successful...

Thanks for your help.
Kobayashy

I havent used Mandrake since 9.1 but I believe that you need
to set the sources in rpmdrake. There should be a graphical utility
to do this. You of course set all of your Mandrake disks.
There should also be a directory called /usr/src/RPM/RPMS or
something like that. In this directory will be subdirectories i386,
i486,i586, and so on. You might as well add these too as you can put
downloaded rpm's in there. (blah-blah.i586.rpm goes in i586 and so forth)
Alot of rpm's for Mandrake 10 can be found here:

http://plf.zarb.org/

There is a way to add this sites ftp mirrors to your rpm utility (rpmdrake?)
but I don't know how. Searching this forum will tell you. In the mean time,
You can download packages from the PLF using your browser, copy them
to the i586 directory and install with the drake. (after setting the sources)

I think kopete is part of the kdenetwork package.