Rpm Program Installation - Tips

Hey guru, agree with you that the proper way to build an rpm is via the legacy way editing the SPECS, proper SOURCE.... and that checkinstall is not a proper way to build rpm's.
Nor alien, nor apt, nor.... name it.

Remains that for the casual user, not spending the time to learn how to correctly build an rpm, checkinstall is the least harmfull system available.

Unless users can actually build proper rpm's, don't tell them to reject checkinstall. Vindju!

Salut Louis.

Please read my post again, I didn't tell anyone to "reject" checkinstall.
As a very experienced RPM packager, I just felt like giving some hints about checkinstall, which I did in my post.

Sure, making RPMs with checkinstall is better than just installing them from sources, as it tracks your files and changes in the RPM database. It also makes uninstalling much easier

I was just pointing towards the poor quality of such packages and although they may do just fine on your very own box, releasing them to other users (as someone suggested in a follow-up to the original post) is, IMHO, much less of a good idea.

Et puis un peu de calme, pas besoin d'être désobligeant (moi ce serait plutôt "didju" que "vindju", question de dialecte )
( yeah, I know, english... just couldn't resist )

Checkinstall rocks!

Guru, the reason why I reacted that way is quite simple:
when a guru says that he doesn't uses, or never will an apllication, most casual users would never look back at that application.

Me, and others on these threads, are promoting the use of checkinstall. Mainly to those users who ask "where do I find a dependency? Where is gnumake?".

Those who don't ask will almost never use it. Or use it to run a quick test.

Others will not even use distribution rpms and build from source as they want better control and performance.

Question of time and energy each of us may want to spend on the system. And the beauty of the SuSE distro is that there are solutions for the lazy as for the savvy.

PM: right, shouldn't have prefixed my "dju", ahotver. <arf>

Hey guys!

It's been a while since I've used Suse (been super busy and haven't had the time or patience to figure out Linux), but I'm back. And I'm having trouble installing Firefox 1.0. YaST won't install the RPM (it only shows the 9.3 and 8.0 versions even though the RPM for 1.0 is sitting right there in my My Downloads directory, which is a source for installation), so I thought I'd try this little trick from the command line.

But, I get this error:

bash: yast: command not found

To get this code, I typed in what the OP suggested:

yast -1 MozillaFirefox-1.0-2.1.src.rpm

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks

As "yast2" (or "yast", which is just the same but forced into text mode instead of GUI mode) is a system utility, it's in the "/sbin" or "/usr/sbin" directory, compared to "normal" applications and tools which are stored in "/bin" or "/usr/bin".
Because such system utilities can only be run as root (at least, that counts for the vast majority of them), those "sbin" directories are not included in non-root users' PATH.

Furthermore, you definately must run YaST as root.

Here's how to do it:

su -m -c "/sbin/yast2"

(and enter the root users's password when prompted to do so)

Also, you don't want to install the .src.rpm file. That is only the source files. You want one with a i586.rpm or something similar.

this is an excellent sticky......ever since i learnt it, i couldnt live without it

I'd like to add to this thread with this wonderful little new article I just found about Checkinstall:

http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/December...rticle360.shtml

http://susefaq.sourceforge.net/howto/rpm.html