well i think the cd drive in my laptop is on its last legs. i managed to get the os on there, but i cant install any packages through the application manager. is there anyway i can install them without having to use my cd drive?

Hi

Well all u need is either download the file via internet or your network if u have a network. Once the file or rpm is on your drive goto the folder where the file is allocated and type in the following cmd
rpm -q package-to-intsall.
This cmd will help u to view if u have this rpm installed. If u have the rpm or package then type rpm -Uvh package-to-intsall, this cmd will update to a newer version. If the package or rpm does not exsit then type rpm -Ivh package-to-intsall.

make sure that u login as root and of course this is done in terminal.

Cheers

great, thanks for the advice. i was actually able to get most of the stuff i wanted off the cd, but i can tell its gonna die any time now. does this trick work for the image files though? or do i decompress the image onto the drive?

rpmfind.net is your friend.
get everything you need, updates, alterations, standard, option.

they have this great search feature.

Here is the trick your looking for:

mkdir /mnt/loop
mount -o loop name_of_image_file.img /mnt/loop
cd /mnt/loop

NOTES: you may have to rename and image file to a img.gz extension and unzip it first, depends how/wehere you got the image from.

he shoots he scores!

Example:
[root@special-ed Images]# ls
2.1as-dd-megaraid-i686.img Pensacola-2.1AS-i386-disc1.iso
[root@special-ed Images]# mount -o loop Pensacola-2.1AS-i386-disc1.iso /mnt/loop
[root@special-ed Images]# cd /mnt/loop
[root@special-ed loop]# ls
autorun COPYING images README.ja RELEASE-NOTES RPM-GPG-KEY
boot.cat dosutils README RedHat RELEASE-NOTES.ja TRANS.TBL

excellent. definitely gonna print out this info. thanks a bunch guys. starting to under linux better every day