O.K. -- for starters, I am only marginally computer literate. I just installed Mandrake 8.1 Standard Edition. I downloaded a few of my favorite programs, and expected the installation to be automatic -- guess not. Well I found the files that I had downloaded and clicked on each only to have the "open with" window come up. I looked in the manual and it referred to rpmDrake -- I don't have this program (I tried find files, and there was nothing by that name). I asked another user for advice, and he mentioned Kpackage -- I don't have this either. Someone gave me the console commands to intall my files, well this worked for one of them, but was a real pain in the a@@! I get various error msgs for the other programs when I tried the manual install. Can anyone help????

BTW -- there are both rpm and tar.gz programs

you WILL have rpmdrake on your system, using gnome or kde there should be a link on your desktop called Software Manager. and it's VASTLY better than kpackage, as it does all the icky stuff for you.

Can you tell me where I might find it or if it could be called something else? The manual says that it should be under System in the Control Center -- it's not there! I looked through every area on the KDE menu and can't find anything like it! I'm thinking either it was left out of my version, or I installed the thing wrong, because I have spent forever looking for it, and it doesn't seem to exist!

Look under K->System for Package Manager, it will allow you to install rpms, on the other hand if you downloaded .tar.gz or .tgz file you can use KArchiver (on Mandy it is under K->Accessories I believe, I am not in Mandy right now) to decompress the archive and then usually go to the directory that is created during decompression and running in console
./configure
make
su
Password: <---- enter pass for root
make install

The only choices under "System" are: Date & Time, Konsole, Login Manager, Printing Manager, and Session Manager -- see my problem???

just try and run rpmdrake in a console window. if i's really not installed, which i think is pretty unlikely, just install it from the cd's, there's an rpm called rpmdrake-1.4-18mdk.rpm on cd1 i think it is.

There are basicly two or three types of files which can be installed.
First one is rpm type file, if you are finding difficult to find RPMDake, use the following command as root in the direcotry where you have the package file

rpm -i packagename.rpm

if it is a .bin file first check if you have persmissions for the file to execute, if you dont change the permission by using the following command

chmod u+x packagename.bin

then run
./packagename.bin

if you have a .tar.gz or .tar file , its like zip file so all you need to do i extract the file, use the following command

tar -xvzf packagename.tar.gz

once extracted find a .configure file to run.
use the following command for that

./configure