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Master of Reality:
this thread is for FAQ ansers/manuals.

[ September 16, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

Master of Reality:
How to install an RPM (Redhat Package Manager) file.
This will tell you how to do the basic install of .RPM files, to get more information on RPMs read the manual page for 'rpm'.

An RPM is a file in most cases containing all the files needed for the program it wants to install. It will choose where the program goes and usually makes all the necessary links for it. Some programs rely on others, these are called dependencies. Some programs have dependencies while others don't, usually simple programs don't and more complicated programs may have many dependencies.

Most of the time what you will do is just a straight-forward install by typing the folloying into the command-line as root (or su in as root):

# rpm -Uvh /home/mojo/program.rpm

The above will:
     - Install or if there is an older version of the program it will upgrade. You may switch 'U' with 'i' to just perform and install and not check to see if it can upgrade.
     - 'v' is to produce a verbose output. This means it will tell you any errors that occur.
     - 'h' will show hash marks as a progress meter.
     - It will isntall the program name program.rpm that is in the directory /home/mojo/

You can just do the following to install a program but the above is considered good practice:

# rpm -i /home/mojo/program.rpm

[ September 16, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality / Bob ]

choasforages:
hmmmm, maybe we should do a totorial of the plumbing commands(cat, dd, >, >>, <, echo) and friends, cuase with those commands, i can do almost anything/*well, cdrecord might come in handy*/

voidmain:
Well, considering that most of the documentation has already been done, and people more or less just need a pointer or jump start in the right direction, our FAQ could primarily be comprised of common questions and the answer might contain nothing more than a link to the answer.  For instance, RPM questions could be answered simply by pointing the user to http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/RPM-HOWTO/ or to a specific portion of that already existing document for a specific RPM question.  

Now in the case where no good documentation exists (doubtful) then we could give detailed answers.  Just a suggestion/idea...  "Remember, Google is your friend" could be the slogan of the FAQ.

[ September 16, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

Calum:
do you think so? i like that idea since it will mean i no longer have to actually write anything however much of the online docs are not geared towards the *complete* newbie, and a lot of the questions asked on these forums are from *complete* newbies.

Also, do you think people (particularly newbies) will think we're not worth the effort if all we do is link offsite?

example - Last night i was looking through the 46 page LiLo manual and i reckon there's a need for an ultra simple guide for newbies. This was the first thing i had to configure once i installed red hat 7.0 (well except getting a mate to sort out X for me on my buggy video card!). If i were just to link somewhere then people would think i did not give a shit about the subject.

Plus it looks like a big part of our FAQs will be translation, so if we just link to sites with one language only, we lose some of the people we are aiming at.

just my thoughts...

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