Chapter 8: RPM Isn t a 1980 s Atlanta-Based Band

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Overview

Installing Programs with RPM

Well, now that you know what RPM isn’t, you are no doubt wondering what it is. RPM stands for Red Hat Package Manager, and it is a very handy system that Red Hat came up with to allow users to install and remove packages easily. Of course, at this point you may be wondering what a package is.

At the most basic level, a package is simply an archived file or an archived collection of files, like the ZIP (.zip) or StuffIt (.sit) files you may already know. Packages designed to be used with the RPM system, however, are slightly different. Such packages are usually called RPM packages, RPM files, or just RPMs, and they are easily recognizable by the .rpm extension at the end of the filename. An RPM package consists of an archived file or set of files, along with a set of installation instructions telling the system’s package manager where in the system to install the package files.

Usually these RPM packages are applications, though they could be other things too, such as fonts or documents. The Package Manager automatically installs each of the components that are in the package in the proper place on your system, making it all very easy on you. All in all, using RPM is very similar to installing Windows programs with an installer.

Fedora (and its Red Hat Linux predecessors) is not, of course, the only distribution that is RPM based — other distributions, most notably Mandrake and SuSE, are also RPM based. However, because different distros place various system files in different places, and because they are compiled differently, RPM packages are often distro specific. Thus, an RPM package for any popular application will most likely come in many different flavors, so to speak, to go with the various Linux distros. As if that weren’t enough, there may also be different RPM packages for the different versions of a particular distro. For example, in the case of Red Hat Linux, you may find RPMs specifically designed for versions7.3, 8, 9, and so on.

As you will come to notice, RPM filenames also specify a CPU architecture before the .rpm extension. You will thus see RPM files ending with i386.rpm (386 class CPU or better), i586.rpm (Pentium class CPU or better), i686.rpm (Pentium II class CPU or better), and even ppc.rpm (Motorola/IBM Power PC CPU, as used in modern Macintosh computers). Those packages labeled noarch.rpm (no architecture) can be used with any CPU.



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Linux for Non-Geeks. A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow Guidebook
Linux for Non-Geeks: A Hands-On, Project-Based, Take-It-Slow Guidebook
ISBN: 1593270348
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 188

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