Hi,

If you haven't read my intro I am an "intermediate newbie" who is learning quite a lot from this website actually.

My Linux box is an AMD Athlon 700Mhz, 128M RAM, dual boot with Win98, dual HD, HDa with 3 windows partitions and 6GB of Linux (1G swap, 1G /home, 4G /usr), HDb is 2.4G and has the root.

The reason for installing Mandrake was more to have the possibility to run the full version of "gcompris".
I tried Mandrake 9.2 first (as I had the 3 installation CDs already),
and I had dependencies problems there.
I then upgraded to LE 2005 (Mandrake 10.2), and learned then how to solve the dependencies (--ish .. still learning ).

I have used the packages and sources from sourceforge

The only one that, so far, I have managed to install with no problems is the Autopackage gcompris-8.0BETA6.x86.package.
However, when running the program from the created KDE or GNOME or ICE menu, the program seems to try to start and then stops.
I have tried to check with "top" whether the task is actually running when I see the tab opening at the bottom of the desktop, but I cannot see any related ones.

All the other packages,

- 6.5.2 that I downloaded from somoewhere else (ftp mirror), seems to give the "loopy" exercise (gcompris-sound missing when I try installing gcompris with rpm -i .., and gcompris missing when I try installing the sounds)
- 7.4.x gave me hassle with libsqlite dependencies loops
and so forth
I haven't tried all the combinations yet.

What is the recommended way to install gcompris?

Thanks
Giuseppe

You are doing things the hard way. If you can, uninstall the autopackage gcompris. Next, go here:

http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/

Select the version of mandriva you are using(2005) and follow the directions for setting up the following internet repositories as urpmi sources: main, contrib, plf-free and plf-nonfree. Once you do that, you will be able to install gcompris using the usual mandriva package installation tools. There are precompiled packages for gcompris in contrib and urpmi will automatically resolve any package dependencies.

In case you didn't know, mandriva uses a modified version of rpm for its package manager called "urpmi". With urpmi, you can set up internet package repositories or "repos" as sources. These repos contain many packages specifically compiled for mandriva that aren't on the install cds. urpmi maintains a database on your computer of all available packages from the repos you have set up. These will be listed in the package selection screen in Mandrake Control Center>Software Management. When you select gcompris for installation, urpmi will automatically download gcompris and any other packages needed by gcompris and install them on your system. urpmi is one of the nicest features about mandriva and once you set up your urpmi sources, installation is a breeze. You rarely need to compile anything from source on mandriva.

Hi kilgoretrout,

Thanks for you reply as a start.
I have tried to use urpmi as root while connected to the WEB.

I was not using it correctly at first, so I will need to give it another try after your very helpful trick.
I am a bit concerned about connecting to the net as root.
Should I do a sudo of urpmi?

Also, how can I install packages that haven't been made available on the repos yet,... like a newer version of gcompris that I can only download from Sourceforge and it is not anywhere else?

Thanks for your helpful hints.

Giuseppe

In the procedure I described, you open a console, su to root and cut and paste the commands that easyurpmi gives you and run them. You are not logging in as root. In your console do:

$ su
<enter root password>
# <paste commands from easyurpmi>

Root is accessing the various repos you are adding via a command line utility called curl but they can be trusted.

For more up to date packages than what's available on the repos, you are likely to run into trouble. You would have to compile from source and you will probably have several packages already installed on your system that conflict with your newer packages. Unless and until you know exactly what you are doing, stick to the packages available in the repos.

Mission accomplished.
Many thanks.