> understood ... thanks so much for the quick response. > I understand yum > and I understand rpm. > does APT work the same? RPM, YUM, and apt-get are all slightly different creatures. RPM is the oldest. It was developed by redhat originally to help people manage what was installed on their machines. It tells you IF you are missing something, but it's up to you to do something about it. YUM, takes what RPM does and goes one step farther. This python script will try to find the missing packages and install them too. If program foo needs libfoo, yum will look through the packages it can download off the net and get them. apt-get is the same idea as YUM, although it is older. It is written in C, I think, I know it's compiled, where YUM is python. That's why apt- get will work so much faster. Also, I've had problems with YUM, and prefer apt-get since it has never completely trashed my system. --andy
