Re: [MiNT] Newbie-problems with installation of RPM

[Guido Flohr <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

Hi Michael,

On Tue, Nov 16, 1999 at 04:50:26PM +0100, Michael Nau wrote:
> My configuration is: No complete MiNT-distribution installed yet, I've
> used MiNT so far only with N.AES. I extracted the rpm.tar.gz archive in
> a directory h:\SpareMiNT\ and put in mint.cnf links like 'sln
> h:\SpareMiNT\bin u:\bin' for all main directories. As I haven't
> installed a command shell yet, I renamed /bin/rpm to /bin/rpm.ttp and
> started it via THING using the options '-Uvh' and the local environment
> 'HOME=u:\home\'. The start directory is the application's.
> 
> I hope anyone can help me.

Welcome to Unix ... :-)

Sparemint is currently *not* bootstrappable. You need a minimum setup and
the program "/bin/sh" is essential, otherwise rpm will not work (because
rpm internally uses /bin/sh to do almost everything).

Please download bash (the GNU bourne again shell) from some ftp server and
install it both as /bin/bash and /bin/sh (you can simply copy the file).
Make sure that both files have the executable bit set (open a "file
manager" window in Thing, select the two files, press CTRL-I ["show
info"], select "Attributes" and check the execute button for owner, group
and other). Then try again.

For beginners I would strongly recommend to put all MiNT stuff on one
single partition (you can put /usr/local somewhere else but the rest
should share one partition). The more symlinks you have the more chances
there are for errors.  Yes, this is a but, but nonetheless reality...

One general remark: I too hate this error message "unpacking of archive
failed".  In fact I consider this to be the most serious weakness of rpm
because the error message is really nonsense and doesn't help at all.
This is partly a general rpm problem, partly because it applies mostly to
errors which would never occur on any other platform than MiNT.  It has
usually to do with soft links.

Ciao

Guido
-- 
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