I'm not exactly a newbie, but close enuf. I have installed RH 7.2 this time around and as there are two disks in my hand, there are plenty of RPMs. How on earth do i behold the potential of the neat packages that are on these disks? Certainly a ls command will just run off the screen with cryptic RPM filenames.

I am spoiled by Mandrake's RPMDrake, which databases the install disks [and other disks/sources?] then gives a graphical front end to their description, dependencies and install. Does RPMDrake work on RH?

I have played with kpackage and cant figure out how to get the same functionality from it. The website for it and the instructions are not clear how to build a package database from disks, it seems to focus on the installed db and installation. Though it's interface is excellent and teases me into wanting to browse a diskfull of RPMs with it [to the loss of 4 hours futzing with it]

In debian, there is dselect. which i figured out, somewhat. That functionality would be excellent also...its technique of adding sources. How is this done do in RH?

I turned to the rpm command, which is powerful. I read the first half of Maximum RPM, pretty astonishing... and yet i still cant find how i can build/access a db of packages that are NOT installed on a machine.

There has gotta be something i'm missing here. Please let me know out there how you are tracking/managing the thousands of packages available for RH and any other thoughts on this topic.

Much appreciated,

lego

you should have gnorpm on gnome which is a frontend to rpm. BUT rpmdrake doesn't use 'rpm' it uses 'urpmi' which is where all that autoinstalling gumpf comes from. i dare say that you could make it work, but you'll need a chuff load of urpmi installs first i'd guess. oh yeah.. the database is from urpmi too.

Theres a package called rpmfind... that does something with uninstalled packages. I have not installed it yet, but might soon!

It claims (I think) to use a database of external packages, build dependencies and size information, then when you question about installing a rpm it tells you what others you need and how much space this uses.

Joe

this is a bit of a stretch as I have gotten this to work on occassion...

with redhat i have used YAST (yet another setup tool) from SuSE...(you can get it off a suse mirror somewhere) now a word of caution...only use it for package selection not for systems configuratin because it cant write as Red Hat will have some very diferent path and file naming conventions than SuSE...

This should be only used if you REALLY cannot tolerate the old rpm -Uvh and waiting on dependencies and such...

good luck

if those are the same 2 discs i have, you can pop the first one in and some kind of autorun launches a util, or you have to do it... i'm not sure, but i know i was in KDE and the discs are i386 ISO's from ftp.redhat.com about a month ago. there IS a kind of setup that ran, it gave me all the packages available during the first install, and it was totally graphical. i'll see if it works again and come back

there it is... mounts /tmp/cdrom, and there's a little shell script-- autorun!
i double click, and it launches...
LOL, it's Gnome RPM. WTG bluecadet

so pop the CD in and either /tmp/cdrom/autorun or gnorpm

?? i'm lost....

gnorpm... you had the short way i had the long