Thank You Kevin for your explanation. It worked like a charm after I had 'su'ed into the RPMs directory and entered rpm -Uvh fest*.rpm like Scott recommended :) Even YAST reports the new version, marking it locked for downgrades :) Thank you all for your hints and recommendations! cheerio Marc On 30.08.2005, at 03:54, elefino wrote:

On Monday 29 August 2005 20:02, Marc Scheib wrote:

...

Please, is there a way to somehow manually install RPMs without engaging YAST?

Um... open a console window, cd to the directory where you downloaded the rpm, and (if you don't have a version of the program already installed) :

rpm -i <packagefilename>

If you already have a program installed (via rpm) and want to get rid of it:

rpm -e <packagename>

If you have a version installed and are upgrading:

rpm -U <packagefilename>

To find out more about the rpm command and its options:

man rpm

I'm not totally clear on when it's advisable to install as yourself or when you should su - root before running rpm.

If you've never used rpms before, you may have no problem at all (because everything that the new package needs is already in place) , or you may get messages about dependencies (conflicts and missing things (like versions of libraries) that the rpm needs to install and work properly).

If you are really unlucky, you get dropped into dependency hell, where you google for hours or days, trying to find package after program after app after library after compiler after......... each one leading to the next and contradicting two that you've already done.... :-)

Usually YaST is good about minimizing dependency problems, but only for sure if you are getting SuSE-specific packages from reliable sites, and are installing a version that's been assembled for your version of SuSE. Dependency hell is more likely to happen if you try to install generic packages or ones that have been assembled for other distributions like RedHat.

Another option is apt-get (apt4rpm), which can be tricky to get configured, but which then does a very smooth job of resolving dependencies.

Kevin