Please help - Gimp RPM installation and general questions
 

Hi,

I have Mandrake 8.2 and I would like to install The Gimp. I downloaded the RPM
file, called gimp-1.2.3-5.i386.rpm (is it ok? there were so many...)and tried to install it just by clicking on it (I use KDE) .The installation program starts, then it stops and it tells me that it needs a file called libpng.so.2.
I tried to look for it but I couldn't find it....also, I don't really understand how this all works:
1. Do I have to look for RPMs that are specifically made for my distribution, or would
for example an RPM for RedHat also work?

2. Why don't they give you all the files you need in one package, like in windows?
There must be a point I am missing. What's the advantage? It all seems too complicated.

Please help, a link to some reading material on the subject would also be really good

Thanks!

Anna

you should generally use rpms made for mandrake.. but then again Mandrake normally has the newest rpms, and precompiled for a higher architecture, so that shouldn't ever be an issue.

libpng.so.2 comes from the libpng package, which you should have on your distro cd's.... you have already got gimp on those cd's as well tho... why not just use the one you already have?

Hello, Anna!

You are simply missing some libraries (the equivalent of DLL files on Windoze) that the GIMP needs. The best way to get RPMs (apart from looking for them on your Mandrake CDs), is by using www.rpmfind.net, it has links to tons of RPMs for many distributions. You can search for "libpng" there, and you'll get a ton of hits with direct download links.

If RpmFind.Net seems a bit confusing to you, let me give you a short crash course on how to use it effectively:

1. Go to www.rpmfind.net and type in "libpng" in the search field (no quotes).
2. You should get over a hundred hits for libpng. Try narrowing down the list a bit... Type "mandrake" in the system field, and "i386" in the arch field, and click "Search" again.
3. You should now only get RPM files for the Mandrake distribution, and only packages that are in binary form (i.e. NOT source code packages, which end in "src.rpm"... Binary packages for PC-compatibles end with "i386.rpm". The i386 stands for Intel 386 compatible. You could get i686 as well, which is for Intel Pentium II CPUs and higher, but it doesn't really make a big difference, i386 should be fine.)
4. These instructions produced only one hit for me, with the libpng version 1.0.8 (the current being 1.2.3), so in this case, you may want to download a file from another distribution (such as RedHat 7.x). When downloading RPMs of other distros, the rule of thumb is to just make sure your distros are similar enough (see last paragraph).

Technically, it doesn't really matter if you download an RPM that was customly made for your distribution (Mandrake 8.1?) or not. RedHat is quite close to Mandrake, and RedHat 7.x RPMs should be just fine. However, if you can get an RPM for your distribution, then get it instead of a "foreign" one. The reason is that different distributions sometimes use different paths to store various files. For example, RedHat (and Mandrake too, I think)stores program files in /usr/bin, and Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 installs them in /opt/bin (I think... it's been a while since I used that distribution).

Oh sorry, forgot to answer your last question, got a bit carried away with the rpmfind.net instructions. :P

The most obvious (to me) advantage with making separate packages for each library is that end users don't have to download the library over and over again with each program they download... Let's say you installed two programs on your Windoze computer that both use the file MSVCRT.DLL. The installers for both of these programs had that file (and I suspect many others) copied to your hard drive twice, in effect, which was unnecessary.

The second reason has to do with the closed-source, proprietary nature of Windoze. For example, when using Visual Basic to create a program for Windoze, developers have to include a whole bunch of DLL files with their programs. Micro$oft only lets developers with a valid Visual Basic license distribute these DLL files with their programs, and as a result these DLL files have to be included with every Visual Basic program you download, because they are not available separately.

With Linux/BSD, since most libraries are Open Source and can be freely redistributed, this is not a problem, so they are shipped separately from the programs that need them.

What would really be nice, though, is that if RPM would have the ability to fetch the packages it needs automatically for you off the Net. Hmmm... I wonder if someone already implemented that? ;)

Thanks!

Things are a lot clearer now.

On my Mandrake CD I found a file called libpng3-1.2.1-6mdk.i586.rpm. It was already installed, so I downloaded the GIMP file for i586 and it installed without problems. Maybe my mistake was that I was trying to install the program for i386 while I had the i586 libraries...

I am still wondering though how to decipher those RPM file names, what do those numbers stand for?

Thanks again !

:) Anna

Just a quick tip Anna, it saves time to just double check the distro CDs for the programs you would like to install - they'll be the easiest (and usually best) versions to install and Mdk supplies loads :p .

The rpm names.....

libpng3 (obviously;) ) - and the series of numbers are just the version numbers - the higher > the most recent, as in this case 1.2.1-6 in a mandrake package.

There may be a number of versions for the libpng3 file but each higher one is usually a bugfix release.


Dutch