Datasheet

“main” (Installation and Administration) — 2004/6/25 — 13:29 — page 174 — #200

Removable Media with subfs

Removable media are now integrated with subfs. Media no longer need to

be mounted manually with mount. The command cd /media/* launches

the automatic mounting process. Media cannot be ejected as long as they

are accessed by a program.

Printer Conﬁguration

Information about the changes in the print system is available in Sec-

tion 13.1 on page 296.

5.3 RPM — the Package Manager

In SUSE LINUX, RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) is used for managing

the software packages. Its main programs are rpm and rpmbuild. The

powerful RPM database can be queried by the users, the system adminis-

trators, and package builders for detailed information about the installed

software.

Essentially, rpm has ﬁve modes: installing, uninstalling, or updating soft-

ware packages; rebuilding the RPM database; querying RPM bases or indi-

vidual RPM archives; integrity checks of packages; and signing packages.

rpmbuild can be used to build installable packages from pristine sources.

Installable RPM archives are packed in a special binary format. These

archives consist of the program ﬁles to install and certain meta informa-

tion used during the installation by rpm to conﬁgure the software package

or stored in the RPM database for documentation purposes. RPM archives

normally have the extension .rpm.

rpm can be used to administer LSB-compliant packages. Refer to Sec-

tion 10.1.1 on page 244 for more information about LSB.

Note

For a number of packages, the components needed for software

development (libraries, headers, include ﬁles, etc.) have been put

into separate packages. These development packages are only

needed if you want to compile software yourself, for example,

the most recent GNOME packages. They can be identiﬁed by the

name extension -devel, such as the packages alsa-devel,

gimp-devel, and kdelibs-devel.

Note

174 5.3. RPM — the Package Manager