A while ago I was researching the ability to watch WMVs in linux. I was having trouble with codecs and mplayer, so I did some google searching. I came across a web page that had a command line walk through for installing apt, synaptic, codecs, mplayer and a bunch of other things. I THINK it was a located on stanfords web site somewhere, but I've lost the page. I remember it being titled something like "Fedora Core 3 Installation Notes". If anybody knows where this page is, could you please give me a link to it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

You hardly even need apt but I suggest you install it anyway! Having both is excellent.

Download the rpms of apt and synaptic from:

http://heidelberg.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=18
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3

Ensure you ge the right one for your system! (Fedora/Mandrake etc and also i383 Sparc etc)

If this isn't listed for your system just go to the home page of each and look there.

Do this command as root:

# rpm -ivh Apt-longfilename12345.rpm
# rpm -ivh Synaptic-longfilename12345.rpm

I prefer Synaptic any day. It is the most complete download and update/installer I have ever used on Linux.

Synaptic should be listed in your K menu somewhere.

Thank you, smudge|lala. I appreciate you posting those links. One thing I liked about that page was, that it had a really big list of repositories and how to set them up in synaptic. Would you happen to know where I could find such a list? I've been looking around, but I'm only finding the actual synaptic RPMs, and not the repo list. Thanks again for the help.

I don't know what you need specifically, but the default install of synaptic (once you hit the 'Reload' button) offers a lot of stuff! If you can't find it there it may not be worth using?

My experience is that if you use too many package install apps or .repo's then you'll wind up with a corrupt system. If youwant to add an app from a specifis repo then I recommend installing 'Yum Extender' for FC3. Don't know what disto you're using? It's a GUI front end for yum/apt.

With this you can add repo's and turn them on and off easily. So if you find a weird app you simply can't do without, and add their repo, you can turn it on for the install and off afterwards thus not affecting your install.

Read about it here.