noob questions

[Trevor Smith]

On October 16, 2004 8:53 pm, A A wrote:

> how do i install downloadable .rpm files?

As others have said, www.fedorafaq.org is YOUR FRIEND. Go there and do what I 
resisted doing for a long time -- follow the instructions to set up YUM. 
Seriously. Installing software is the very significant achilles heel of linux 
compared to Windows (and, presumably, Mac OS). It is not easy to stumble 
through on your own sometimes.

But once you set up yum, that's it. It's ridiculously simple 90% of the time. 
You just figure out the name of the software you're looking for and type 'yum 
install name-of-software' and bang! it's done for you.

Now, like I said, I resisted setting up yum because it is potentially 
frightening and confusing to follow the instructions, but once I did, my 
biggest complaint about linux (installing software) mostly went away.

Note that yum isn't perfect but it's a really great tool.

> i was following some directions pretty good to get Xine (i managed to
> download all the files) however when the directions mentioned that i must
> be in root i got lost. also what location must the files be loaded to so i

the directions most likely said you need to "be root", which is to say "you 
must be logged in as the user named "root", which is the "super user" or 
system administrator" or whatever you want to call the one big user account 
that has access to every damn bit of the system if he/she wants.

Typical wisdom is you should never log in as "root" to do day to day stuff, 
since "root" can do stuff -- even destructive stuff -- to the system. You 
might do this by mistake or, when logged in as "root", potentially malicious 
programs might get executed by you (thus being able to do anything you can 
do) and mess things up.

You should always log in as some other user that does NOT have "root's" 
privileges. This prevents accidents and malicious stuff from happening. When 
you DO want to install stuff or jigger with other system settings, you can do 
so without logging out and back in as "root" by executing the command:

su

from a terminal window. You will be prompted for root's password and then you 
can do things like install software (with yum, for instance, or "by hand").

Good luck!

-- 
Trevor Smith // trevor at haligonian.com