If You're Not Running GNOME or KDE

First, you'll need to mount the PowerTools CD-ROM on your CD-ROM drive.

Place the PowerTools CD in your CD-ROM drive. As root, type the following:

# mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
#

Please note: On your system, you or the system administrator may already allow users (instead of only root) to mount the CD-ROM drive. Users have this privilege if the user option is included in the /dev/cdrom line in the /etc/fstab file. However, keep in mind that you must be logged in as root to install any PowerTools RPMs.

After you've mounted the drive, cd to the mounted CD-ROM directory with the following command:

# cd /mnt/cdrom
#

When you list the contents of the CD with an ls command, you'll see the following directories: SRPMS, alpha, i386, i586, i686, noarch, nosrc, sparc, and sparc64. The SRPMS directory contains the PowerTools source RPMs. The alpha, i386 and sparc directories contain the RPMs for the three specified operating system architectures. The noarch directory contains RPMs which are not architecture-specific and should install on any of the three architectures.

In the examples in this chapter, the /mnt/cdrom/i386 path will be used as a general example. You should substitute the correct directory for i386, depending upon your architecture and which package you're installing.

cd to the i386 directory, like this:

# cd i386
#

List the RPM files in the directory with an ls command to see the complete list of RPM packages included for Intel-compatible systems.

You will probably want more information about a specific package before you can decide whether you want to install it. You can use RPM's querying capability to find out more information about the packages, like whether the package has a Web page associated with it. See the section called Impressing Your Friends with RPM in Chapter 5 for instructions on how to find out information about packages using RPM.

After you've decided what you'd like to install, you can install it with RPM. RPM is a powerful command line driven package management system with many capabilities. See Chapter 5 for more information on how to use RPM to install and manage PowerTools packages.