I'm a Linux newbie, but I have a fair amount of Unix experience. I just installed SuSE Professional 9.0 a few days ago, and I had no install problems. Everything seems to be working OK.

As a learning exercise, I decided to upgrade the video player. I found and downloaded about 7 RPM's for various pieces. When I was browsing the directory containing the RPM's, I noticed I could get a display of the contents of each one, and that the display included a button labelled "Install using Yast".

Being a newbie, I figured "what the hell", so I used Yast to install the Xine library and then the Xine UI. The result was unusable, and I traced the problem to a missing Xine library .so file. However, the missing .so was in the first rpm I installed.

After much experimentation, I found that:

1) If I install using rpm from the command line, everything works OK.

2) If I install using Yast from the GUI, installing the Xine UI causes Xine library files to be removed.

I'm willing to accept that (1) Yast may have bugs and/or (2) Yast only works with RPM's specifically created for Yast, but I don't know.

Wha I'm really trying to figure out is how I decide if I should install something using Yast or using rpm. I'd appreciate any enlightenment I can get from more experienced users.

"Wha I'm really trying to figure out is how I decide if I should install something using Yast or using rpm. I'd appreciate any enlightenment I can get from more experienced users."

YaST (SuSE), apt-get(Debian), up2date(Red Hat), and urpmi(Mandrake) are all highly automated install programs. They are designed to find the package that you want and all of its dependencies and then install them for you, if necessary removing older versions of the packages. These program are very nice when they work, which is most of the time.

On occassion they screw up you have to drop down into the lower logic level of rpm and kpackage. Screw ups happen more frequently when you are doing something complicated like a KDE or Gnome upgrade. When these installers screw up you are often left in a bad fix because you do not even know what the automated installer was trying to do when it screwed up and it may have left a partially updated set of packages.

Another case where you have to ignore the highly automated installer is when you want to install a package from someplace other than your distributions official update site or one of its mirrors. The automated installer probably will not be able to figure out an unofficial site.

So YaST is just one of the install techniques that you need to know. You need to know rpm and you will find kpackage very convenient at times. The first thing that you need to do when you are installing by hand is to know what packages you have installed. The command:
rpm -qa | sort > /root/data/every.rpm.txt
will create a file which lists all of your rpms.
rpm -qi bunny
will tell you whether you have bunny installed.

You should read:
man rpm
and learn how rpm works.

You find the rpm packages that you want with Google. You can download them with your web browser, gftp (my preference), or kbear.

kpackage is handy for installing downloaded rpm packages. You set up your konqueror file associations so that *.rpm is opened by kpackage. Then you go to the directory where you have downloaded the rpm packages and click on each to install it with kpackage.

In any case I think that the automated installers are way over hyped for what they are and when people post problems with the automated installers on LinuxQuestions I immediately tell them to abandon the automated installer and do it by hand. This causes consternation because they do not know how to do it by hand but if you know both methods then it is far easier to fix install screwups by hand than to talk the automated installer to do something that is beyond its mental capacity.

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Steve Stites