RPM's.... I love them but hate them!!!!

[CommonNobody]

I'm currently running Mandrake 8.0 and love but hate it. My biggest problem is software.

I love the way you can install an RPM, GIMP or KDevelop for example, and then you have a beautiful little button on your applications menu to install and run it and love it.

But I also have a big problem with them. Half the time when I install an RPM it seems to dissapear, Bastille and especially Wine for example. How do I figure out where they went, how to use them, etc? I looked over Winehq.com but it was really not overly helpful.

Is there any way to determine what became of these things after I installed the RPM?

[jman_77]

RPMs will generally run off to their pre-determined paths. Go to a command prompt and type "whereis wine" or whatever you're looking for. It should come back and tell you a path to the file.
It confused the heck outta me too :)

[CommonNobody]

::Buys Jman a round of beer::

That 'whereis' command r0X0rZ!! u r 31337!!!!!!!!

[Evil Jeff]

You can also open kpackage or gnorpm and it will have a list of files and their paths in the rpm.

[jman_77]

Beer makes me feel all funny....

[Strike]

I just plain hate them.

(sorry, I had to)

[bdg1983]

Beer?

I certaily do agree that rpm's can be very frustrating though sometimes they work quite well. Would you say it's better to at least compile (rebuild) the rpm source and then install the resulted package?

[Keyser Soze]

That is an option.

[dvdnut]

i mainly use tarballs and rpm's but whats a src.rpm and how do i use them

[bdg1983]

rpm --rebuild packagename.src.rpm and if no problems, the packagename.i386.rpm will be in /usr/src/Your_Distro/RPMS/i386 where you can install it.