The major part of the Red Hat distribution consists of a set of RPM (Redhat
Package Manager) files. An RPM package typically contains binary
executables, along with relevant configuration files and documentation.
The
rpm program is a powerful
package manager, which can be used to install, query, verify, update, erase
and build software packages in the RPM format. Rpm convieniently
maintains a database of all the software packages it has installed, so
information on the installed software is available at any time.
The binary RPM files in the distribution have been built on a system
running the distribution itself. This is important, because most of the
programs in the packages rely on shared libraries. From RedHat version 5.0,
the new version 2 of the GNU standard C library (which is 64-bit clean) has
been used. This version of the library is commonly referred to as
glibc or in Linux: libc 6. All executables in the
distribution have been linked against this library. If you attempt to
install binary files from a different distribution, chances are that
they will not work, unless you install the libc5 package for backwards
compability.
The names of the RPM packages contain the suffix .arch.rpm,
where arch is the architechture, having the value i386 for Intel
platform binaries. The packages you install must match the versions of the
shared libraries available on the machine. The
rpm program is usually quite good at
ensuring that this is indeed the case, however, there are ways around this
check, and you should be sure that you know what you are doing if you force
installation of packages this way. However, using the RedHat installation
boot disk, it is ensured that the correct set of RPM packages are installed
on the machine.
If you discover an RPM package that was not installed on your system during the installation process, don't despair. At any time, you may (as root) install RPM packages, for example:
rpm --install WindowMaker-0.18-1b.i386.rpm
You can even install directly from the Internet, if you know the URL of an RPM package:
rpm --install ftp://rufus.w3.org/redhat-contrib/noarch/mirror-2.9-2.noarch.rpm
Another version of the RPM packages contain the original sources used to
build the binaries. These packages have the suffix .src.rpm and
are situated in the SRPMS directory. These packages are not needed on
the installation CD, and in fact, there is not even enough disk space on an
74 minute burnable CD to accomodate them. Of course, you can make a
separate CD with the SRPMS.