SUSE Linux

Chapter 5. Package Management

I am not a follower of fashion. I prefer to think that fashion is a follower of me. In reality, what happens is that fashion goes in cycles while I remain stationary. Once per cycle, roughly every 15 years, I come briefly into fashion and then pass out again, in much the same way that a clock that has stopped is right twice a day. All of which is by way of introducing the observation that Linux users tend to be followers of software fashion. They love to load the newest applications and try out the latest cool stuff simply because it is the latest cool stuff.

The labs in this chapter will show you how to find new packages, how to install them, how to find out what’s already installed, and how to build applications from source. The underlying package management technology is RPM, but there are several fancy package management tools that build on top of this, as you’ll discover.

Find Out What’s Installed

The most common format in which software packages are made available for SUSE Linux is a package format called RPM, which originally stood for “RedHat Package Manager” because it was developed by Linux distributor RedHat, but now stands for “RPM Package Manager” because it is used by many Linux distributions. RPM is not the only package format around; another popular format is the one used by Debian Linux (usually called .deb packages), which has many ardent supporters. There are other formats used to distribute software—in particular, .tar archives ...