Silver22 wrote:Rpmdrake is new to me and quite different from what I'm accustomed to. This is probably why it seems awkward to use, but I expect to get used to it in time.
Hi
Silver22, welcome to Mageia. Glad to hear you're enjoying the community.
I've been using RpmDrake since 2002 (Mandrake Linux 9.0). It's a wonderful app, but I know what you mean about it feeling awkward to get accustomed to at first (it's certainly evolved a lot over the last 10 years). Here are a couple of tips from my own hard-won experience:
- After you install Mageia and start RpmDrake for the first time, its top left-most drop-down menu will be set to "Packages with GUI". I often forget to change this (I normally keep it set to "All") and wonder why the search comes up empty when I go to install my favourite CLI apps like "unrar" or whatever. D'oh!
- In the "Find" bar, if you left click on the magnifying glass (or binoculars, or whatever icon you see) a menu with radio buttons will pop up with criteria for searching inside packages. This is super handy if, say, you desperately need lib64foobar.so but don't know the name of the package it's in, etc. (I'm embarrassed to admit how long I went before stumbling on this feature by accident.)
If you need to RTFM, it's just a couple of
Help > Help clicks away from within the app (it will install the required doc files if you haven't got them already) and the same info is conveniently available
here on the Mageia Wiki.
And of course if you're really stuck on something, somebody here on the forums will help you out.