First and foremost, the urpmi-related commands all must be run as the root user. The only exceptions to this rule are urpmq and urpmf which can be run as the standard user.
Let us examine the command structure of urpmi.
the structure of the urpmi command is: urpmi [OPTIONS] APP_NAME (Where APP_NAME is the name of the application to install.)
The possible options for urpmi are:
--media: Select specific media to use.
--excludemedia: Do not use the specified media.
--update: Search packages in media that is marked as containing updates.
--auto: Install all dependencies without asking.
--auto-update: Same as above but also automatically runs urpmi.update.
Now, let's say you want to install Kopete, the KDE chat client. To do this you would issue, as root, urpmi kopete. In the case of Kopete you might have to answer a question such as:
In order to satisfy the 'qca2-plugin-openssl-lib' dependency, one of the following packages is needed:
1- qca2-plugin-openssl-lib-2.0.0-1mdv2008.1.i586: OpenSSL plugin for QCA (to install)
2- libqca2-plugin-openssl-2.0.1-2mdv2008.1.i586: OpenSSL plugin for QCA (to install)
What is your choice? (1-2)
After that you will have returned exactly what is being done on your system. You will be asked if you wish to continue with the installation. The default is yes so you can just hit enter to continue. If you add the --auto switch to the command you will not have to answer "y" to install dependencies. As the package, and the package dependencies, install you will see "#" symbols fly by, indicating progress. Once your requested package finally installs you will returned back to the command prompt. Congratulations, your package is installed.
