A REAL NEWBIE QUESTION 1700

On Friday 23 June 2006 16:34, vin stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.misc...:

Okay, first of all, you'll need to be more specific about what package you installed. Be advised that there are different flavors of.rpmpackages. Some are for RedHat or Fedora Core, others may be for Mandriva, yet others for SuSE, etc. The latter are especially different and may not work in your system.

That's the worst way of trying to install something... ;-)

The idea is that you use your distribution's package manager and open the package from there, or that you use the commandline - as root, of course.

Well, chances are that you've tried to install the package by clicking it as a regular user, which means that you don't have the privileges to install it - your regular user account doesn't have write access to the directories the package would be installed to.

As most GUI utilities in GNU-Linux (and other UNIX operating systems) are only front-ends to the commandline utilities, you won't be getting any feedback about a failed install. It's quite possible that the program wasn't installed at all.

If it was installed and you didn't have to supply a root pbuttword, then you're doing something wrong, because then you're doing your daily work while logged in as root. This is very dangerous to your system - you can easily damage it - *and* makes it a lot easier to compromise your system via the internet.

As for where the files are placed, executables usually go in *-bin,*

Libraries are installed in the various *.-lib* hierarchies and configuration files go under *-etc* somewhere. The package you installed should be able to shed a light on where its files went - you can query that with any package manager.

Either way, if the package was successfully installed, its executable name will be in your $PATH variable, so you can execute it by simply entering its name at the commandline or in the dialog field which you get by pressingAlt+F2in KDE.

As for getting the new program added automatically to your menu, this is something that largely depends on the distribution itself, and I don't have any real experience with Fedora Core, so I can't help you out on that one.

You *can* of course make use of the menu editor of the environment you are using - e.g. KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox et al - or you could add a desktop icon for the program. In KDE, you do this by creating a new.kdelnkfile - right click on the desktop, choose "New", then "Application" and fill in the data. ;-)

Hope this helps... ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)