[ Thanks to mayank
for this link. ]
“The Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) has establised itself as
one of the most popular distrubution formats for linux software
today. A first time user may feel overwhelmed by the vast number of
options available and this article will help a newbie to get
familiar with usage of this tool.”
“RPM stands for Red Hat Packet Manger. The traditional way to
install a package was to take an archive and then just extract the
files off it into the required directories. This worked fine but
then the administrator faced a problem when it came to updating the
packages. He must locate the files from the previous install and
then make sure they are removed from the system. RPM helps here. It
is a easier and more flexible way of installation and maintainence
of packages. Upgrades are easy. RPM maintains a database of the
packages installed on your system as well as the locations of the
files and the version numbers. Anytime you install a package in rpm
format, RPM will check to see whether there are any files are in
conflict between the packages installed and the packages being
installed. It will also tell you whether any other packages need to
be installed for the software to work. All in all RPM makes life a
lot easier.”
“RPM has become really popular and several distributions are now
based on it. Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Caldera — all use the rpm
format to maintain the system software.”