Installation guide

218 Chapter 25. Package Management with RPM

System Veriﬁcation

Another powerful feature is the ability to verify packages. If you are worried that you

deleted an important ﬁle for some package, simply verify the package. You will be no-

tiﬁed of any anomalies. At that point, you can reinstall the package if necessary. Any

conﬁguration ﬁles that you modiﬁed are preserved during reinstallation.

Pristine Sources

A crucial design goal was to allow the use of "pristine" software sources, as distributed

by the original authors of the software. With RPM, you have the pristine sources along

with any patches that were used, plus complete build instructions. This is an important

advantage for several reasons. For instance, if a new version of a program comes out,

you do not necessarily have to start from scratch to get it to compile. You can look at

the patch to see what you might need to do. All the compiled-in defaults, and all of the

changes that were made to get the software to build properly are easily visible using

this technique.

The goal of keeping sources pristine may only seem important for developers, but it

results in higher quality software for end users, too. We would like to thank the folks

from the BOGUS distribution for originating the pristine source concept.

25.2. Using RPM

RPM has ﬁve basic modes of operation (not counting package building): installing,

uninstalling, upgrading, querying, and verifying. This section contains an overview of each

mode. For complete details and options try rpm --help, or turn to Section 25.5 for more

information on RPM.

25.2.1. Finding RPM Packages

Before using an RPM, you must know where to ﬁnd them. An Internet search will return

many RPM repositories, but if you are looking for RPM packages built by Red Hat, they can

be found at the following locations:

• The ofﬁcial Red Hat Linux CD-ROMs

• The Red Hat Errata Page available at http://www.redhat.com/apps/support/errata/

• A Red Hat FTP Mirror Site available at http://www.redhat.com/download/mirror.html

• Red Hat Network — See Chapter 27 for more details on Red Hat Network

25.2.2. Installing

RPM packages typically have ﬁle names like foo-1.0-1.i386.rpm. The ﬁle name includes

the package name (foo), version (1.0), release (1), and architecture (i386). Installing a pack-

age is as simple as logging in as root and typing the following command at a shell prompt:

# rpm -ivh foo-1.0-1.i386.rpm

foo ####################################