Yellow Dog/Fedora Core problems
 

Ok, so it should be painfully obvious that i am new to Linux. I read a few articles, did some google-fu, and was able to get a nice clean and relatively pain free install of YDL on my PS3. Now the fun starts. So I take a look around linux. Anyone who says Linux is like windows must have feeble powers of observation. So I am stoked, I get to learn a completely new way of doing things right? Sounds fine to me. So I open up some settings, change a few things, magic happens and I feel proud of myself. I open up Mozilla (an old friend of mine from windows), and hop on youtube. Oh yeah I need a flash player, so I go to the Adobe site to download. Thats where the fun stops. A tar.gz? RPM? YUM? Uh-oh. Back to google. So I find a few things that are theoretically informative, but ultimately not helpful to my situation. I found out that tar.gz is kinda like a bunched of files "tarred" together and that RPM is a red hat package manager that is supposed to help things install smoothly. So I click on "Download .RPM", and then a webpage with a media player pops up telling me that it is trying to play a Real Player object. So I back out and try the yum do-hicky. It downloads to desktop, so far so good. I find nautilus, open up the yum thingy-bob, and a window that says "Package installer" opens up and says it is checking for dependencies and what not, and then tells me "Package Installed!". Alas, I still have no flash player. The same thing happened with Azureus and Acrobat reader. So what am I doing wrong? Would someone care to explain to a nub like me what exactly a tar.gz, rpm, and yum are, how they differ, and how I can use them effectively? I really enjoy Linux, but I am ultimately frustrated by my lack of knowledge with it. I hear that the more some knows windows, the harder it will be to learn linux, but I threw away all windows notions out the door when I started linux, because I know, recognize and appreciate that these are two completely different animals. So that is my long winded plea for help. I searched among several tutorials, self-help guides, and Linux for Retards manuals, but I am still pretty much dumbfounded when it comes to making Linux work the way I would like it to (and telepathy has never worked for me on computers ), so if someone could help me figure out how to install stuff on this slick beast, I would be much obliged. By the way should I disable the yellow dog environment and switch to Gnome or KDE to make things easier? and if so how would I do that? Damn I AM dumb...

Okay for starters, in your posts try and separate your thoughts into paragraphs so it's easier for someone else to read. Even numbered bullets would help explain what it is you need to know. So if I miss something it's b/c my eyes got lost in the jumble of words in your post. Here goes nothing.

TAR.GZ
tar is a utility used to put a bunch of files/directories together into a single file. It does NOT do any compression.
In steps gz. With Gzip we add compression, much like winzip in windows. So foo.tar.gz could have thousands of files & directories in it compressed.
If you find foo.tar then it's uncompressed but packaged together so it's easier to transport.

RPM
This is much like a Windows's EXE format. Well it's ONE of Linux's attempts at making package installation easier. The reason your browser tried to PLAY that rpm file is because Real Audio network has a playable format with .rpm extension. This can be fixed by removing the real audio plugin from Firefox's plugin directory. We can address that later if you want.

YUM
This is Fedora's way of installing applications from the commandline. You can similarly install yumex and then have a nice GUI for using yum. So from commandline as ROOT user you could type "yum install yumex" and then you'd find the shortcut to it in KMenu->System->Yumex I believe.

FLASH PLAYER
When you install the flash player plugin in linux it installs it on your system. It does not put a copy of the plugin into your firefox plugin directory. This is why it is not working. If you ever have a question as to what plugins you have installed for firefox, in the address bar type "about: plugins" without the quotes and without a space after about:. I had to throw a space in there b/c these forums will take the colon and letter p and turn it into a smiley as in -> :p
I'll explain how to install the flash plugin in a separate post, this is just for educational purposes.

Well, that helps a lot actually. So what happens now is i need to:
1. Disbale real player plugin for mozilla
2. enable flash plugin for mozilla

Also, I did not not need to do anything with the command line with the RPM, just the yum?
And for the tar.gz, I would have to decompress it to a folder, then mess with the contents of that from the command line...oh man... no wonder people of average intelligence run screaming away from Linux.
Ok could I get a link to that post about installing flash player and enabling plugins for mozilla?

Now i have another problem... what is the reason for the repos.d files under the yum folder hanging up my Add/Remove software window? Everytime I went to Add/Remove software I got an error message saying "network failure" of some such nonsense until i deleted all the repos.d files

No you do not need to disable the plugin for Mozilla. You can leave that alone and just create the symlink for the flash plugin into your firefox plugin directory. So if you have the flash plugin installed, you will MOST likely find it at /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so . Since every installation is different please verify it exists. So do the following from a terminal window (commandline) as ***ROOT*** user. Once again, ROOT user:

1) locate libflashplayer.so
We'll call this FLASHPATH for reference since I don't know what the real path is on your system
2) locate firefox-bin
We'll call this FIREFOXPATH. So if it was /usr/lib/firefox then you'll append /plugins/libflashplayer.so as in -> /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
3) ln -s FLASHPATH FIREFOXPATH

That's it, just close/start your browser and you have flash plugin installed. Please do not use the paths I wrote above unless it's actually what they are on your system.
If you get a file/directory not found when running the "ln -s" command then you didn't listen and you used the paths I wrote above rather than using the "locate" commands in step 1 & step 2.

RPM
Please use the "man" command to learn more about any command in linux. So you could do "man rpm" without quotes from a terminal to learn how to use it.
If you want to install an rpm locally, you could type "rpm -ivh foo.rpm" without quotes. If you get a dependencies failed when using rpm, you can use "yum" to install it because yum resolves dependencies for you. "yum install foo.rpm"

TAR.GZ
To decompress this and extract to the current directory you are in you could type "tar xzvf foo.tar.gz" without quotes. Please use "man tar" to learn more. In Fedora you could simply double-click on the foo.tar.gz and a GUI app will open up allowing you to do the same thing without having to use terminal. You can also right-click on foo.tar.gz and choose "Extract"

Wait a minute, are you telling me you deleted all the files under /etc/yum.repos.d/ ???? That is not a good thing. Those repositories are what populate the app listings when you run that add/remove software app. I hope you didn't really delete those.

Nothing happens at step 1. It just blinks twice and goes back to
[root@localhost ~]#

I have tried 6 times to "install" flash player and every time it says it is already installed.

And yeah I was told to delete them because they were causing system hang-ups. Every time I went to add/remove software or tried to install an RPM i got that stupid-ass error about some imaginary network malfunction. I tried some "yum install yumex" command i think it was, and I got http 404 erros up the wazzoo, so I disable the firewall, just in case it was some network thing, but that didnt fix anything, so I asked on another forum about this, and they said kill all the repos.d files and things would work right again. Well it DOES work,,,but I did something really bad didnt I.......uh-oh.

Run as ROOT /usr/sbin/updatedb and let it update your database. Then run STEP 1 again. If nothing comes up run "rpm -q --all | grep flash" . If it lists a package for the flash plugin then run "rpm -e NAMEOFPACKAGE" else, download the flash plugin from adobe's site and install it from your computer using "rpm -ivh FLASHPLUGIN.rpm" or whatever it's called when you save it to your hard drive. Then when you have it installed run "/usr/sbin/updatedb" and then proceed with the STEPS I outlined. You have to have repositories in "/etc/yum.repos.d" or you won't be able to add applications or update your software on fedora. Try googling how to reinstall those files as you will need them.