Note that this program was not written by Red Hat (although it uses
their interface library), so you shouldn't try to get support from
them for this. Bug reports for this program should be directed to James Henstridge
<james@daa.com.au>.
The tree and list form a convenient display of the currently
installed packages on the system. The tree shows the heirachy of
package groups, of which you can select one at a time. The list
displays the packages that are part of the currently selected group.
You can select multiple packages at a time, and those packages need
not be in the same group (ie. You can select a package from the X11
group and one in the Games group at the same time). Just above the
tree is a label that tells how many packages are currently selected.
It is pretty obvious what most of the menu items do, so I won't go
into the details. Most of the useful features found in the menus can
be used from the toolbar. Here is a description of what the toolbar
items do:
Note that you can not remove packages if you don't have priviledges
to modify the database and delete the files in the package (ie. you
must be root).
The Main Window
When you start up Gnome RPM, you will be presented with a window
containing menus and a toolbar on the top, a tree to the left and a
list to the right.
Install Window
The install window consists of a list with a few buttons around it.
You will want to click on the "Add" button first, which
opens a file selection window, from which you can select RPMs to
install or upgrade (both source and binary RPMs). Now you can select
some of those RPMs from the list you made, and either query them or install/upgrade them.
In adition to using the file dialog to add files to the list, you
can drag files from the Midnight Commander to add them to the install
list.
When that is done, the tree on the left of the window should
display all the packages available in the rpmfind system. If you want
to limit the packages displayed, put a search term into the entry box
at the top and press enter.
You can then expand these tree items to see what versions of each
package are available. Clicking on a package in the left pane will
display its details in the right pane. You can then click install or
upgrade to find what packages have to be downloaded to install that
package. If you click yes in that dialog, the packages will be
downloaded and an install dialog will be
displayed on screen with those RPMs listed.
The Query Window
The query window is a dialog with a notebook widget inside it. Each
page represents one of the RPMs you chose to query. The information
is pretty self explanatory. If you are querying a package that has
already been installed, you will have two buttons below the
information. One says "Uninstall" and the other says
"Verify". They do what you think they would. If the
package hasn't been installed, the buttons will be labeled
"Install", "Upgrade" and "Check Sig".
The Find Window
In this window, first select the criteria for the search. The
possible searches are for packages that:
Now type in the search string and press return or click the find
button. Now select which RPMs you want information about from the
list and click the query button. This will bring up a query window.
The Rpmfind Window
In this window you can browse and download packages off the internet
using the rpmfind system (which involves a web database of metadata
extracted from a large number of packages that can be used to get
quick summaries about a package and trace its dependencies). On the
first start, it may take a while since it has to download a number of
files off the remote metadata server.