(There's really not any reading for this assignment, though you'll probably find yourself consulting man pages.)
For this assignment, you will again be working in groups on the machines in HAS 200, with the same group assignments as for Homework 2. You should continue to have one person operate the keyboard and mouse and another person take notes on what you're doing.
Your first task is to apply available updates to the packages you installed in Homework 2. I recommend using yum for this. You can read a brief tutorial about yum here, or check the man page. Dr. Konstam has set up a mirror (copy) of package updates on Charon; you can configure yum to access this mirror (which presumably will be faster to access than something offsite) by copying /etc/yum.conf from Hardy.CS.Trinity.Edu to your machine. You can then use the following commands:
Install a package or packages of your choice, using a package manager (e.g., yum or rpm). yum makes this very simple; you can use yum search to search for packages and yum install to install them. Some packages that might be interesting are the ones for mplayer (a movie player) and switchdesk-gui (the graphical version of switchdesk, a tool for changing your default window manager / desktop environment). If you get error messages beginning ``Could not find the GPG key'', the simplest way to make them go away seems to be to comment out the gpgcheck=1 lines in /etc/yum.conf (by inserting a # at the start of the each line). (Update: The right way to deal with this is supposedly to install the needed keys. I am told that this can be done with the command
rpm -import http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEYbut have not tried this solution myself.)
Install a program of your choice from a tarball (i.e., without the use of a package manager such as yum). You can find a collection of not-so-serious programs packaged this way at ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/games. As described in class, the standard way to install such programs is to use tar to unpack the tarball, and then look at the README and/or INSTALL files in the resulting directory for further instructions. Usually you will issue the commands ./configure, make, and make install. (If you run into problems installing one program, feel free to try another. Usually the installation process goes smoothly, but not always, and I don't expect you to figure out what to do if it doesn't -- though it would probably be a learning experience!)
Briefly describe your group's experiences carrying out the instructions in the previous section. What package(s) did you choose to install? What other program(s)? Were there any problems? If so, what did you do to resolve them?
Briefly describe your role in the group's work.