Dear Troy:

Wow! 

All I had to do was change the o to 1 and then the fun started. Yesterday I 
read a article on Yum online that explained to me how the whole thing works, 
etc. Now I see it with my own eyes. First I installed acroread. Impressed. 
But I was utterly amazed when I installed mplayer. Yum found thirteen 
dependencies, installed them perfectly. And, then, to my real surprise, I 
found that these programs, though not part of KDE or Gnome, installed 
themselves on the SL menu. No need to add them manually. That's installation 
heaven. My kudos to the SL team!

I would imagine that it might be a good thing to enable the Dag source by 
default. 

By the way, here is a funny story about yum:

Yesterday, when I was first learning how to use yum, I typed "yum update". The 
SL update list then came up. At the end of it, I was asked: " Y/No". I failed 
to see this when I typed "yum install mplayer". What happened then, of 
course, was the yum read the first letter of the new command (Yum...) as the 
answer "Y" for yes and proceeded to ignore my mplayer request and to download 
and install the entire SL update.  This time, after my fresh, new install, I 
am a bit wiser. But you have to admit that is an odd coincidence. Yum tries 
to protect you by giving you only 1 of 26 letter to click for confirmation, 
and the letter I chose just happened to be the confirmation letter.

You live and learn.

Thank you again.

Benjamin

One last question on this subject. You mentioned another acceptable SL source 
for yum: AT

On Thursday 23 June 2005 10:42, Troy Dawson wrote:
> Hi Benjamin,
> Yum is working properly.  The problem is that in the base S.L. release,
> all the things you are looking for are not there.  You should do a
>
>    yum list <packagename>
>
> to see if it is there.
>
> I'm not positive about acroread, but I do know that mplayer and it's
> pal's are in the DAG repository.  To enable the DAG repository you can
> edit the file /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo, and change enabled=0 to
> enabled=1.  Or, from the command line you can do
>    yum --enablerepo=dag <command>
> such as
>    yum --enablerepo=dag list mplayer*
>
> Troy
>
> Benjamin Sher wrote:
> > Dear friends:
> >
> > I reinstalled SL last night. It went perfectly. All my devices were
> > recognized and configured properly (sound card, printer, video, etc.). My
> > ftp works fine but not through kget. Instead, I found that gftp works
> > just fine.
> >
> > I then tested yum. It works fine in general, but I am mystified at not
> > being able to download and install certain programs from our own SL
> > sources. Specifically, these refer to acroread and mplayer. Here is the
> > output:
> >
> > Password:
> > [root@localhost sher]# yum install acroread
> > Setting up Install Process
> > Setting up Repos
> > sl-base                   100% |=========================| 1.1 kB   
> > 00:00 sl-errata                 100% |=========================|  951 B  
> >  00:00 Reading repository metadata in from local files
> > sl-base   : ################################################## 1447/1447
> > sl-errata : ################################################## 174/174
> > Parsing package install arguments
> > No Match for argument: acroread
> > Nothing to do
> > [root@localhost sher]# yum install mplayer
> > Setting up Install Process
> > Setting up Repos
> > sl-base                   100% |=========================| 1.1 kB   
> > 00:00 sl-errata                 100% |=========================|  951 B  
> >  00:00 Reading repository metadata in from local files
> > sl-base   : ################################################## 1447/1447
> > sl-errata : ################################################## 174/174
> > Parsing package install arguments
> > No Match for argument: mplayer
> > Nothing to do
> > [root@localhost sher]#
> >
> > I would appreciate your help with this issue. I would like to be sure
> > that yum works perfectly. Could you please check and see if your yum is
> > working properly.
> >
> > Thank you so much.
> >
> > Benjamin