The Web Find Window

The web find window is used for finding packages to install on your computer off the internet. To do this, it uses the rpmfind database -- a system devised by Daniel Veillard. This system allows you to search for a package by name or the summary information, download the package most appropriate for your computer (checking both architecture/OS and distribution) and download all the packages that are required by the desired package, but are not installed on your system.

The web find window consists of an entry field along the top where a search term can be entered, a list of packages to the left, and an information area to the right, similar to the query windows in other parts of the program.

When you initialy open the web find window, the package list will contain entries for every single package available in the package database. After loading the package list, gnorpm will asynchronously check what versions of each of these packages you have, and display this information in the second column. At this point, you can select a package and click the install or download buttons to grab the most appropriate version along with its required packages.

The install button will prompt to download the desired package along with the other required packages. It will then open an install window with those packages selected. From here you can either choose to install or upgrade the pacakge. The download button does the same as the install button, but it stops after having downloaded the files.

If you want a bit more control, click on the tree expander next to the package name. This will list the versions of the packages available, and the distributions that each package came from. These entries will be coloured the same way as the ones in the install dialog, so you can easily see how their version numbers compare with what is currently installed on your system. By clicking on one of the alternates for that package, it fill the information area with information about that particular package. If you click on the install or download buttons now, they will grab the selected alternate, rather than the first (most appropriate one -- the alternates are sorted so the top one is the most appropriate).

To narrow the list of packages displayed in the list, you can perform a search. Enter a regular expression into the entry field, and click on the search button. The package names and summaries will be compared against the search term, and those that give a match will be displayed. This way you can easily find a package by name, or keyword (for instance, searching for mathematics will give a list of all packages with that word in their summary).

Configuring Rpmfind

The previous description the system sounds quite simple. The area where the rpmfind code can make mistakes most is in guessing which package is most appropriate. For this reason, there are a number of things that can be tweaked to give the best result.

First of all, it is useful to understand how the alternatives are sorted. Fist of all, packages for different architectures or operating systems are removed from the list, as they will not install correctly. Next, each package is given a score, and then the list is sorted by this score. This is how the score is calculated:

So to help rpmfind guess correctly, you will want to modify these parameters. First of all, check to make sure that your vendor and distribution have been guessed correctly in the preferences window. If you always want to get the latest version of a package, also select that you want the latest version with the checkbox in the preferences window.

Next, you will want to give some of the distributions ratings of -1, so that packages from them will never be selected. If you have a Red Hat based system, you probably want to set the SuSE distributions to -1, since the package names of the two distributions are different, so some dependencies might cause problems. Similarly, if you use SuSE, you may want to disable Red Hat distributions. You can disable distributions for other platforms if you want, but this is not strictly necessary, since they are filtered anyway.

You can also increase the ratings of distributions you want as well at this point.

Next you will want to select the closest mirror for the distributions. If your hostname is set correctly, some reasonable defaults will have been chosen. If not, you can alter the mirror lists in the preferences window. This will give you faster downloads since they come from closer computers.

With these changes, the rpmfind features will give much better results, and generally be more helpful.