Installation guide

Chapter 25. Package Management with RPM 219

As you can see, RPM prints out the name of the package and then prints a succession of

hash marks as the package is installed as a progress meter.

Note

Although a command like rpm -ivh foo-1.0-1.i386.rpm is commonly used to install an RPM pack-

age, you may want to consider using rpm -Uvh foo-1.0-1.i386.rpm instead. The -U option is com-

monly used for upgrading a package, but it will also install new packages. See Section 25.2.4 for more

information about using the -U RPM option.

Installing packages is designed to be simple, but you may sometimes see errors:

25.2.2.1. Package Already Installed

If the package of the same version is already installed, you will see:

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

foo package foo-1.0-1 is already installed

If you want to install the package anyway and the same version you are trying to install

is already installed, you can use the --replacepkgs option, which tells RPM to ignore the

error:

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

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

This option is helpful if ﬁles installed from the RPM were deleted or if you want the original

conﬁguration ﬁles from the RPM to be installed.

25.2.2.2. Conﬂicting Files

If you attempt to install a package that contains a ﬁle which has already been installed by

another package or an earlier version of the same package, you will see:

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

foo /usr/bin/foo conflicts with file from bar-1.0-1

To make RPM ignore this error, use the --replacefiles option:

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

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

25.2.2.3. Unresolved Dependency

RPM packages can "depend" on other packages, which means that they require other pack-

ages to be installed in order to run properly. If you try to install a package which has an

unresolved dependency, you will see:

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