Hey guys, thanks to Sal, Skyline, and others Fluxbox 1.1.2 is working great! What I need to know now is: How do I effectively deal with all these different package formats? I've run across them all at some point or another, but the .rpms seem to be the easiest ones to deal with. Also, as I'm still a Linux newbie, I'm still trying to learn to "Think Different" with respect to installing/uninstalling. Is there a central local where Linux keeps all RPMS?
Thanks to Sal for showing me the use of "rpm -e file_ here" Is there a straight forward manual somewhere to teach newbies the most "useful" commands in term mode? Ahh well, I didn't mean to blabber on and on.

Linuxly Yours,
Whoots

rpm.org? rpmfind.net? (can you google?)

rpm and .rpm is redhat, dpkg and .deb is debian, slackware uses .tgz packages and pkgtool,
or of course, download the source and compile your own!

HTH

When you google for Linux stuff, try this

www.google.com/linux

Here's another good link for how tos:

http://www.tldp.org/docs.html#howto

Lot to read there. You will be ing for a while now.

Later

Thanks for the link Dalek! Also bbers, I've seen the .src.rpm (source RPM's) I assume, but since I'm still a newbie, I'm not sure how to compile them yet.

Linuxly Yours,
Whoots

Hi Whoots, glad you got Flux working......

now, looking at:

.tar.gz
.tgz

You'd download your Tarball, su to Root user in a command line then depending on which of the two above you've got you'd issue

tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz

or

tar -zxvf filename.tgz

Remember that the Tarball would be extracted into your current working directory (you can check that with pwd)

This will untar and unzip the file and create a sub directory with the name of the filename. Then you'd cd (change directory) into the new extracted directory and usually you'll have a readme file or an install text file that will have further installation instructions - How you install depends on whats inside the Tarball - if its source code, then you'd typically do

./configure
make
make install

(but the key thing again is to definately check the read-me and install files, just incase of different instructions)

Thanks for the help again Skyline as always. I'm determined to master installation/uninstallation in Mandrake even though it "Feels" painful sometimes! But hey, I remember feeling the same way back in the days of DOS. I remember how delighted I was when I discovered the "attrib" command. I could finally rid myself of stubborn hidden files and archieved ones. Ahhh..those where the days. Reminisces about the days of my 486 DX 2 66 MHz modified to a 486 DX 4 100 MHz with a Trinity Overdriver. Remembers the oohhh and ahhhs of switching from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. Remembers how mad i was when the first Pentium came out 6 months later. Ahhh well, $2000 as become obsolete!

I'm having a hell of a time trying to install Flashplayer, I downloaded the tar.gz file and I extracted it and then ran the installer but when it comes to the part where I have to specify where the mozilla directory is at I can not for anything get it to not stop saying that I need to enter a valid directory. How do I go backwards through dir's in console? Like, If I'm in /home/Desktop/myfolder and run the installer and I need to specify /usr/lib/mozilla as the installation directory, how would I do that?

Leviathan, yeup that's the achilles heel of Linux. When you decompress a source file like .tar.gz and ./configure, make, it will then install to the preset path determined by the Linux distribution that tarred the file. This presents quite a problem because of the different paths of the various distributions use for key directories like /bin, /lib, /etc, /user and so on a so forth. Also, even if you are lucky enough to find the RPM you almost always get the dreaded "bad signature" messege which means that the RPM will probably now work correctly. I'm a Linux newbie myself and this is the most trying part in my Linux growth period.

Linuxly Yours,
Whoots

P.S Don't give up though, there are many good people in the Linux community who will go out of their way to help you. Salparadise, Skyline, Mdg, Dalek are some of the kind Linux folk who have helped me.

Thanks whoots. I try to anyway. If I don't know I point. Go here, read this, look there etc etc.

You are doing it right, if you're doing as you indicate, with leading '/'.
Maybe the installer doesn't like your permissions, are you installing as root?
What is the exact command you ran, and what is the exact error message?

Hello.

I had the same problem the default directory is wrong. You need to see what version of mozilla you are running then open another term and type:

$ whereis mozilla-1.3.1 or whatever version

that should point to the directory it is in

finish your plugin install and enjoy!

Hope I was a help.