Hi there, i am very new to linux and i just cant seem to grasp it.

my friend recently installed Fedora Core on my machine and has left me to figure it out for my self.

i have no understanding of it and i am finding it very hard just to do simple tasks.

My first problem is that i cannot get a program called GAIM working. i have installed it on the add remove programs (well tryed). i tryed repeting the process and it says that GAIM is already installed.

When i goto the terminal and type GAIM it says "gaim: error while loading shared libraries: libao.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

this makes about as much sense as a elephant riding a unicycle to me.

Oviously something has gone horrificly wrong and i just dont know what to do.

Can anyone please help a newbie with his first steps.

Thank you

Dan

It appears that a library of files required to run GAIM is not installed. Here is the package for Fedora Core 1. Just download it, and as root, type "rpm -ivh #package name" without the quotes and subsitiuting the full package name instead of #package name. I know there is a GUI tool to do this, I just forgot what it's called!

[edit] Here is the link for the Fedora Core 2 package. Be sure to download the package that corresponds to your version.

Welcome to RPM dependencies.
One thing that really helps is a tool called apt4rpm, link, which will automatically download and install the dependencies for you. For instance, if you were using it to install gaim, you would type on the command line, "apt-get install gaim", and it would install libao and whatever else may be needed. I realize that you may not be very good with command-line tools yet, but trust me, it's definitely worth it.

I have found yum is a very nice package management application for fedora. It comes pre-installed, though you should get a better set of repositories for /etc/yum.conf. you should be able to find one easily that you can paste in after doing a simple google search. If you can't find one, I'll post mine.