Open SUSE® 11.0 and SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server Bible

Chapter 12. Working with Packages

IN THIS CHAPTER

• What is RPM?

• Installing an RPM

• Querying an RPM

• RPM and dependencies

• Removing an RPM

• Creating an RPM

• Installation sources

• 1-Click installation

• rug and zypper

Originally, there was no such thing as a package in Linux. It was a dark time for people who have a penchant for an organized, manageable, and above all, clean system.

A package is a file containing all the files of an application, library, or anything else with data in it that can be installed, removed, queried, and managed as one entity. The RPM format and the tools around it were developed in the mid-1990s by Red Hat. SUSE and a number of other Linux distributions were quick to adopt it. RPM is the leading packaging system on Linux, and is used both by Red Hat and SUSE, but it is by no means the only one: Debian and its derivatives including Ubuntu use a different system for managing packages.

Note

RPM originally stood for "Red Hat Package Manager," but is now officially just the "RPM Package Manager."

In the dark days, when you needed to install new applications, you downloaded the source code, untarred it, configured the build environment, and compiled it. When it came to installing the application, you had no way of telling what file belonged to what application. This led to orphaned files existing on a system when you wanted to remove the application or upgrade it.

Enter RPM to solve this issue. RPM uses a central database that contains information about all software installed on the ...