okay, supposedly this program is "installed" on my machine. I have been told to use the "install new software" icon in the configure your computer section. Well clicking on that does the exact same thing as it did before I installed easy urpmi. It prompts to look for uninstalled mandrake packages and pulls a bunch of them up. I don't want to install any mandrake packages. I want to install museek (the soul seek client for linux) and it's dependencies, I want to install yahoo messenger, and I want to install kerio personal firewall. These are all things I downloaded on my own. You can't get them off a linux distro disc. Most of the software I want to install, you can't get off a linux distro, so I am hoping maybe these rpm's will do more then just install software off the disc. Maybe easy URPMI is NOT installed on here for some reason. I followed all the instructions on the webpage for it to install though, and seeming =ly it worked. I just have noticed no difference whatsover in my machine after installation, nor can I find it with nautilus. If that program is really this useless, then I prefer to figure out how to use ark to install, and just do more work... Then again, like I said, maybe I am doing something wrong, and am not using the program correctly, or just haven't found it yet...


Any support is greatly appreciated... thanks,

Ben

Post the file names of the stuff you downloaded.

URPMI is the mandrake version of the RPM system, the bonus of URPMI is that for mandrakised RPM's it should (in theory - If I understood how it works for the 2 1/2 years that I ran mandrake) check and install any dependancies.

Easy UPRMI is a website. That allows you to set up the sources that you want to use with URPMI. I always made sure that I had a source for everything that was available. It works in a nice easy graphic way, i.e. you tick the boxes for the sources you want, then you use the dropdowns to select the source location nearest to you (well probably the nearest geographical one, as the theory is that it would be the fastest connection).

After following all three stages you end up with some command line text/instructions that you just cut and paste into a terminal/konsole (yes you'd usually have to be root).

The text/instruction then just updates your sources/files as to what packages are available for installation, if you uninstall something it will just cross reference what you've got in the system and what's available. So that when you start checking boxes you get the correct stuff.

The only thing that I ever noticed was that I always made sure that I had a "PLF" source, as the plf people often have more up to date packages available - but if you select either a plf or mandrake package then it will normally want to install the dependencies for whosever package you selected in the first place.

Oh and it only works correctly with "mandrakised" RPM's i.e. RPM packages optimised for mandrake, if you tried a SuSE rpm or a fedora/redhat rpm, you will invariably get dependency conflicts. It's one of the reasons that I changed to gentoo (though the same would apply for debian), the package manager does do the full dependency check - if you feel that the RPM's for the stuff you downloaded are a little obscure or you could only find them as tar.gz, then maybe you should either look into a debian based distro or see if you can install "apt4rpm" and try to get the stuff that way. You may still have probs with apt4rpm, but if you, say installed Ubuntu or Knoppix and then changed the apt-sources to reflect "proper" debian sources, then there's not much you won't be able to install with just an "apt-get install whatever" command - debian has in excess of 10k packages available.

regards

John

ok... these are tar files... For some reason I thought URPMI dealt with those as well. It seems everything I like is in tar.gz or tar.bz2 files...

These are the files that I MOST want installed on my machine right now...

MUSEEK -0.0.040714-2.tar.bz2 and gtkhtml-0.8.tar.bz2

Here is museek;
http://rpm1.pbone.net/index.php3
here is gtkhtml;
http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/mandra...-6mdk.i586.html

Thanks! That worked!