[olug] rpm Howto

[William E. Kempf]

nate said:
> I have come to the conclusion that I'm not reading the right howto. What
> prompted this search in the rpm Howto is that I was downloading a file
> and trying to install it with RPM.  I could not get it to install and
> could  not figure out why.  I have now forgotten which program I was
> trying to  install, it will come to me later.  Ha!
> Can you steer me in the right direction?  I thought, and maybe
> correctly, that  rpm was not installed on my (MANDRAKE 9.1 ) System
> because I could not get it  to work.

If a distro doesn't install rpm, it's not an RPM based distribution and
you'll not likely want to deal with RPMs at all.  Mandrake is an RPM based
distro, and does install rpm by default.  But you don't want to use it ;).
 At least not directly.  While you read the documentation for rpm you'll
also want to read the documentation for urpmi, the Mandrake wrapper that
makes rpm usable.  In a nut shell, if you know the name of a package you
want to install you simply run (as root):

# urpmi packagename

This will interrogate rpm repositories that you've configured (man
urpmi.addmedia) for the package, figure out if there's any dependencies,
and install all of the rpm's required to get the package installed.  If
the package you want doesn't happen to be in any of your configured
repositories, but you have the rpm in question, you can run the command
(as root):

# urpmi /path/to/file.rpm

This will still try to resolve package dependencies and install everything
required.  This is the Mandrake equivalent of apt-get.

-- 
William E. Kempf