"RPMs can be a great way to manage the packages you install on your system. Unfortunately, not everything you might want to install is available in RPM form. Perhaps you need a more recent version of a program than the one that ships with your distribution; or maybe it's a program you wrote yourself; or perhaps it's just something that's very obscure. Similar dilemmas can occur with non-program packages, such as font or clip art collections.
"Whatever the case, if you're installing a program for a single computer, chances are you'll just install it the old-fashioned way, by typing make && make install (or some similar set of commands) in the source directory. make gets the job done, but it means you're giving up the benefits of the RPM system. What's more, if you're maintaining several computers, running around installing the same package on all of them can be tedious.
