It is generally advised to upgrade your version of rpm at least up to to the semi-official errata on rpm.org. rpm has locking problems which are greatly reduced by these versions. If the rpm locking bug has hit you, please check rpm.org's repair instructions.

This repository can be used in several ways, either you browse through the directories searching for the bits you need, or you can use one of the available package manager tools.

In any case you may first want to import ATrpms' signing key:

When you have found the rpms you need and want to install them, you have several choices.

• The hard way: Download manually the rpms you need and install them with rpm -Uhv.

  This is O.K., if you only want to install a couple of packages.

  But this method doesn't scale well. If you want to install packages with multiple dependencies or want to keep your system up to date, you are better of with a package manager.

• The easy way: Use a package manager like smart and/or apt and/or yum. This will ease your life with staying up to date with Red Hat erratas, as well as installing rpms from 3rd party packagers like atrpms, freshrpms, dag, dries, ccrma and several others.

  • Follow these instructions (examples are for Fedora 7 on i386, modify accordingly for other distributions, for example replace f7-i386 with sl4-x86_64 for Scientific Linux 4 for AMD64):

    • smart: Make sure the following lines are included in /etc/smart/channels/smart.channel:

      #
# atrpms
# Fedora 7 - i386 - ATrpms
#
[atrpms]
name=Fedora 7 - i386 - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f7-i386/atrpms/stable
type=rpm-md

    • apt: Make sure the following lines are included in /etc/apt/sources.list:

      #
# atrpms
# Fedora 7 - i386 - ATrpms
#
repomd http://dl.atrpms.net f7-i386/atrpms/stable

    • yum: Make sure the following lines are included in /etc/yum.conf:

      [atrpms]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1

    You can then retrieve further rpms with smart, apt-get, yum or synaptic.

    Note that there are yet another two sections named 'testing' and 'bleeding' which are not automatically enabled in the default configuration (this is on purpose).

  Now that your system is apt enabled, you will have to run

  apt-get update

  to freshen the lists of available packages, and

  apt-get dist-upgrade

  to update you system to the newest packages. Use for example

  apt-get install synaptic

  to install synaptic (a graphical user interface for apt-get) etc.