On Monday 24 January 2005 00:47, Mike Chalmers wrote: > Will someone tell me what urpmi is?
OK, before I fall asleep : All Open Source software is available as *source code*, i.e. written text. As such an application can be downloaded to your hard drive. Then, you face the challenge to compile it. That's not for the faint-at-heart, because inevitably you'll run into the cumbersome *dependency hell*. Which means that your desired application needs other applications in order to compile. - But it is doable. To make things a little easier, RedHat developed a method called *rpm* (RedhatPackageManager). This means pre-compiled, binary collections of files, constituting an application. Of course, there's a trade-off here : in order to install correctly, the system must be configured in pre-defined ways, such as per distribution (Red Hat). But the *rpm* packages do not resolve the *dependency* problem. This means, that when you install a *.rpm* you'll have to install other *.rpms* first. The procedure will tell you which ones. But this is time-consuming. Then, another distribution (Debian) invented a smarter method : the *apt-get* procedure. Here, all dependencies are resolved, and when you type : *apt-get -install <application>* the dependencies are resolved, downloaded, installed prior to the application itself. Very smart and efficient. These packages have the extension *deb*. Originally, Mandrake was derived from RedHat. The main difference was the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Where RedHat used Gnome, Mandrake used KDE. That doesn't matter, it is a question of personal liking. But Mandrake uses *rpm*. Now, in order to be as user-friendly as Debian, the Mandrake developers invented *urpmi*. I honestly don't know what *u* stands for, but a qualified guess would be *Uniform Redhat Package Manager Installer* - or some such. Anyway, it is really, really smart. The only pre-requisite to using *urpmi* is that you have defined some *sources*. Which means that you'll have to find some servers to supply you. That's easy as well : Go to : http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ And follow instructions EXACTLY. You can choose a multitude of servers for each category (main, contrib, updates,plf), but not all servers get updated regularly, so please experiment. As a rule of thumb : select servers on the other side of the globe, because they tend to be idle when you are awake ;-) This accomplished, installing software is as easy as it gets : 1. The GUI method : Just click the *System-->Configuration-->Packaging-->Install Software* or (and that's the way we prefer here, because you can see what's going on) : 2. Open a terminal (Konsole), type *su*, give root-password and type : *urpmi <application>*. You'll love it. Kaj Haulrich. -- *sent from a 100% Microsoft-free workstation* * http://haulrich.net * *Running Linux (Mandrake 10.1) - kernel 2.6.8*
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