I recently decided to start using linux on a second partition just for the fun of it. So far things havnt been too complicated. However im running into a problem which has me stumped. I run into a roadblock everytime I have to manually use the terminal to install an rpm. Basically I invoke the rpm with the following command:
rpm -Uvh <filename>.rpm

It does its thing, complains if anythings missing...once I resolve the missing dependencies I do it again and it acts normally, gives a 100% status but it never seems to be successful. For instance, if I try to invoke the rpm using the "Install Packages" feature of Fedora 4 it tells me that source package rpms cannot be installed this way...Makes sense. But when I use the command line like the one above, it appears to work fine, but if I try to load anothr rpm(thats not a src rpm) using the "Install Packages" feature, it still says that it cannot find the needed dependancy. The world would be a much simpler place if all programs had an install rpm :-P As you can see Im new to all this, the basic question I guess is how do you install source rpms correctly? I

If you're using Fedora use yum to install stuff - it resolves the depedencies for you. See here: http://www.fedorafaq.org/#getsoftware

Generally you'd do rpm -i for a source RPM but rpm -Uvh will also work fine. Your source RPMs will be in /usr/src/redhat (or /usr/src/RPM) if you installed them as root or ~/rpm if you installed them as your user. Have a look at the rpmbuild command (man rpmbuild) to see how to build a source RPM. Generally though its just rpmbuild -ba my.src.rpm. Mandriva has a good RPM Howto (http://qa.mandriva.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RpmHowTo) which should get you started with packaging software, if that's what you want to do. If you're just interested in installing stuff then see above about yum.

Quick question about yum. I followed that tutorial and successfully installed xmms mp3 player which leads to two questions:

1.) I used the "yum list available" command and it threw out a huge list of all the available installs, this is great, but I can only see the last 60 or so in the terminal window...is there a way to see them all?

2.) I notice that xmms-mp3 was not listed under the list of installs...how did the person doing this tutorial know to invoke "yum install xmms-mp3" when xmms-mp3 is not in the list? am I missing something?

That depends on what type of terminal window you have opened - a GNOME or KDE (konsole) terminal should have normal scroll bars just like any GUI application, at a non-gui console screen do shift+Page Up.

If you setup your yum.conf with those extra repositories it should be listed. Where did you get xmms-mp3 from?

Step 12 of the yum tutorial you had in your original post... It worked, im using it right now, but I dont see it listed...I see the skin one, and the rest for xmms, but none that is xmms-mp3

Also, im using Fedora 4, so I believe its the Gnome Terminal window, it had scroll bars, but it will only allow you to scroll up to about the "s" 's in the list...Shift-PageUp doesnt go any higher either :-/ also, rpmbuild is not a recognized command on my system..."man rpmbuild" yeilds no response...

Oh ok. Well if you installed it with 'yum install' then it must be in one of the repos you setup. I'm not sure why it wouldn't be listed.

By default it only scrolls 500 lines I think. Goto Edit->Current Profile then on the 'Scrolling' tab you can configure that number. You can also pipe the output to more like this: and scroll through it bit by bit. You could even send the output to a file and then open that file in a text editor and go through it: . Linux is very flexible

or possibly or if that doesn't work