Member Avatar for aripaka

Hi All,

Like most of our friends, I am also a newbie to Linux. I had installed Fedora core 4 on my PC. No doubt it was working very good. But i am a bit confused with the procedure of package installation in linux. The following are the pproblems i had faced:

1. Initially I had installed some Personal Desktop stuff with some development tools. Recenty i had downloaded the XMMS player rpm and was directly run it by double click. It was throwing out a message "This RPM is a source package, so cannot install with system-config-packages"..What does that mean?

2. Now I had tried with the Xine player which I downloaded a GZIP file.which had the contents- a gz file and a .spec file. I unzipped the inner gz file also to get a folder of some makefiles and configure files. I followed the readme which instructed me to run ./configure first and then make and as the final step run "make install" in the shell. When i ran the ./configure it check for some C compiler and it displayed OK as i have got the GCC but at the end it tried to execute some sample test programs it had and they were not running throwing an error saying "unable to find stdio.h". Then i tried on my own writing a small C program with printf and ran gcc and it was not running throwing the same. Why is it so...? GCC is the C compiler that comes by default and shud run fine.

The procedure of installing packages doesn't seem to be much user friendly like in windows where u have something like a registry that has restricted access and the shortcuts automatically created. But here is there anything like registry... a bit confusing experience is that every package is tangled with lot of dependencies. I am not complaining, but asking is there is any way it get the packages installed smoothly...or is there any minimal set of dependecies to be installed that most of the packages need?

Though this is too much what i have posted. Please help me break the ice...!!!

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by chrisbliss18
Member Avatar for chrisbliss18

You're going in the wrong direction and are just headed for more problems. The RPM that you downloaded isn't a compiled package, it is a package that includes the source. You can compile the RPM using "rpmbuild --rebuild [filename]" in order to generate a RPM file that you can install the software with, but I doubt that is what you want to do. You can usually identify a source RPM if the filename ends in "srpm" or the filename contains "source" or "src". The RPM that you need to download will be a RPM built for your specific platform. There should be RPMs available that are built for Fedora Core. If there aren't, look for ones that are compatible with Red Hat.

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