rpm independence

After some consideration, made a swtich from Opensuse 10.3 to PCLinuxOS 2009.1.

One of the many advantages PCL offered over OS was the ability to cache downloaded packages. In OS I needed the Smart package manager to do this.
But, I realised that having the rpms cached did not allow easy access in another PCL installation. Synaptic, the package manager in PCL integrates repository management and app management in a single interface, unlike OS. But, there are no settings to install rpms from a directory, all the sources have to be online. This is a major freedom limiter.

In any case, I found that this hinderance can be overcome with the rpm -i command. Thanks to rpm -i , I could install most of the apps I had downloaded in the previous installation. The ones that did not install were the ones that caught the dependency flu. In the GUI, the dependencies are automatically downloaded and installed, not with the rpm command (atleast the man page didn't suggest any setting for this).
One app that refused to install was vlc. Though there were other dependencies, which installed easily with rpm - i, the libv4l2 always held up the proceedings with a dependency error. I found that adding a "--nodeps" parameter would allow instation to proceed without dependency checking. And that is how I got vlc installed. So eventhough there seem to be some dependencies missing, the app works fine. I did observe the fact that these dependencies were not downloaded during the earlier installation, which was why they were not in the cache. So apparently synaptic too avoided a dependency check on this package.

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