Dependency Hell

[mjordan2nd]

Well, my friends computer somehow got messed up in a thunderstorm. Somehow it did something to his Windows system. I convinced him I could fix everything if he switched over to Linux. I ended up making myself look like an idiot. Well, he decided to take my advice. I asked him to download Slackware 10.1, but he ended up accidently downloading Mandrake 10.1 . I've heard lots of good things about Mandrake, especially about how user friendly it is, so I told him to stick with it. Now, I've never used Mandrake before, but I've used FC, so I'm somewhat familiar with the dependency problems. We tried to get Gaim so he could use it, but it had dependency problems and it couldn't compile from source. Now, in FC whenever I had dependency problems, I would just compile from source, but in this case I couldn't do so. I don't have his machine with me, so unfortunately I can't supply you with the exact problem he was having, but I think that his system couldn't find GCC, when I know it was there. If this is the problem, what can I do to fix it. I thank you for your time, and any answers I may get.

[sether]

Use urpmi. "man urpmi" or Google it. Basically, if you want to install Gaim, for example:

urpmi gaim

as root. You might have to do a little bit of setup first though, but it'll resolve dependencies pretty well.