I have Mandrake Linux and I am a new user of Linux. I am facing lots of problems installing software packages in Linux, especially .rpm files.
Can anyone help me out in installing RPM files in Linux?
Here is what I learned and wrote down to be the standard install routines for rpm and tar.gz files. You can find out what the switches mean by executing the following from the command line (CLI):
man rpm
rpm --help
man tar
tar --help
rpm –ivh packagename.rpm
rpm –Uvh packagename.rpm
rpm -qa | grep packagename
locate packagename
tar –cvf myfiles.tar mydir/
Similar to above, but add a z for creating .tgz (.tar.gz) files)
tar –cvzf myfiles.tgz mydir/
A common way to install software from source will be done similarly to the below:
tar –xvzf Apackage.tar.gz
cd Apackage
./configure
make
make install
Looks like the original answer was updated to include information on how to verify that the RPM file was indeed installed. Was also answered over at Where did rpm install go?
Some other related RPM links on Ozzu:
Try this command to figure out if the RPM was actually installed:
rpm -qa <rpm name>
This must match the exact RPM name. If you don't know the exact RPM name, for example if the actual RPM name is hotrod-1.0-1.i386.rpm, you can find it by running this command:
rpm -qa | grep hotrod
This will list out all the installed rpms and filter out the result to only show the ones with the word hotrod in it.