“Redhat’s package manager ‘rpm’ is a powerful tool for
installing, removing, and maintaining the software on you Linux
system, unfortunately for users new to the Linux / Unix world it
can also be quite confusing as their is no Windows
equivalent.”
“While you may use GUI tools ( such as ‘gnorpm’ or ‘kpackage’ )
to install and remove packages more often than the command line, it
is still important to become familiar with the command line utility
as it has several advantages over its GUI counterpart.”
“The Redhat package system does more than simply install, and
remove software. RPM maintains a database of the packages
installed. Before installing or removing packages it checks the
database for ‘failed dependencies.’ What this means is the rpm
utility is checking to see if installing or removing the package
will break any other installed packages on your system.”