How to download a file without installing?

[Anne Wilson]

On Thursday 17 April 2008 20:22, Andrew Farris wrote:
> Anne Wilson wrote:
> > On Thursday 17 April 2008 17:11:35 Mary Ellen Foster wrote:
> >> On 17/04/2008, Anne Wilson <cannewilson at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >>> It's time to admit defeat on this one.  I've set selinux to permissive.
> >>> I've rebooted and relabelled.  I can't even get konsole to run, so no
> >>> command-line work is possible.  I did hope briefly that simply opening
> >>> the package with the installer might realise that I just wanted a
> >>> localinstall, but of course you can't add any parameters to that.  It
> >>> looks like a dead-end on that laptop.
> >>
> >> You could try ctrl-alt-F1 and use the virtual consoles ...
> >
> > It's worth a try, thanks.  I've had to leave it for tonight, but I'll try
> > that tomorrow.  I think, though, that I'm going to have to put one of the
> > mini distros on that laptop.  Still, it would have been nice to test F9
> > from the hardware POV, even though I always knew it would be too slow to
> > work with.
>
> You can also add a '3' to the end of your kernel parameters in grub before
> you boot (edit at the grub menu for just that one time), which will get you
> to runlevel 3 and just work in the virtual terminal until you've got the
> network up and running (or at least the rpm installed).
>
Unfortunately none of these methods were successful.  Adding '3' didn't boot 
to level 3!  The method involving ftp to a mirror is out - I don't have a 
connection.  Using Ctrl-Alt-F1 gives me a terminal and I tried the yum 
command from there.  It said it couldn't retrieve the mirrorlist, and 
couldn't retrieve repository metadata.  Attempting to install from a 
graphical file manager says that local installs are not supported.  End of 
road, I'm afraid.

BTW Ctrl-Alt-F7 doesn't do anything.

Anne