Installing PowerTools Packages

Installing PowerTools in a GUI Environment

If you're using GNOME or KDE, place the CD-ROM in your CD-ROM drive. You'll be prompted for the root password (you must be root in order to install packages). After you type in the root password, either the Gnome-RPM or the Kpackage package management program will start automatically (depending on you GUI environment) and can be used to install PowerTools.

Refer to the Official Red Hat Linux Getting Started Guide for specific instructions on how to use Gnome-RPM. See http://www.general.uwa.edu.au/u/toivo/kpackage for more information on how to use Kpackage.

If you are not using GNOME or KDE, you will need to use the shell prompt to install PowerTools.

Installing PowerTools from the Shell Prompt

First, mount the PowerTools CD-ROM on your CD-ROM drive and use ls to view its contents. If you need to know how to mount a CD-ROM, see the section called Mounting the PowerTools CD-ROM.

You will see the following directories: SRPMS and RedHat. The SRPMS directory contains the PowerTools source RPMs. The RedHat/RPMS directory contains the RPMs for the three specified operating system architectures.

The RedHat/RPMS path is used as a general example. You should substitute the correct directory for RedHat/RPMS, depending upon your architecture and which package you're installing.

cd to the RedHat/RPMS directory:

cd RedHat/RPMS

List the files in the directory with ls to see the complete list of RPM packages included for Intel-compatible systems.

You will probably want more information about a specific package before you can decide whether you want to install it. You can use RPM's querying capability to find out more information about the packages, such as the packages' functions and origination. See Official Red Hat Linux Customization Guide for detailed instructions on how to query packages using RPM.

Alternatively, you can search through the CONTENTS file to find packages that interest you. See the section called Navigating the CONTENTS File for instructions on how to do this.

You can install your selected packages with RPM. RPM is a powerful command line-driven package management system. See Official Red Hat Linux Customization Guide for more information on how to use RPM to install and manage PowerTools packages.

Once you have finished installing your packages, you should unmount your CD-ROM. If you do not already know how to unmount the CD-ROM drive, see the section called Unmounting the PowerTools CD-ROM.