[vox-tech] Re: newbie now having trouble with pico

[Matthew Holland]

Katie wrote:
> I tried finding Mandrake rpm's, but when I couldn't I went for Red Hat.  I
> was told they were almost identical.  Was I misled?

Generally speaking, the only time you should have to install rpms from a 
distribution other than the one you're using is if your distro doesn't 
provide what you're looking for at all (this is relatively rare).  It 
turns out that the right way to install pico in Mandrake seems to be to 
install pine.  In fact that's the case for recent distributions of Red 
Hat as well, so you may have ended up with an old Red Hat rpm or 
something from another distro entirely.

A good way to figure this out is to go to http://www.rpmfind.net.  You 
can search for packages, libraries, and installed files.  It's not 
perfect, but if you're clever about it, you should be able to find the 
package you're looking for.  For example, searching for "pico" doesn't 
get you the Mandrake rpm, but if you search for "/usr/bin/pico" you'll 
find that it's provided by the pine package for Mandrake.

> Yeah, this could be the problem.  When I downloaded, KPackage took over
> and I was really just a monkey pressing whatever buttons it gave me.  I'm
> thinking I better try the above method from now on.

Good idea.  Learning command line usage for rpm will force you to learn 
a little more about how rpm works.

Matt