The introduction of Red Hat's rpm in 1995 was
a huge step forward for Linux distributions. Not only did it make possible the
management of packages on Red Hat Linux,
but due to its GPL license, rpm has become the defacto standard for open source
packaging.
The rpm program has a command-line interface by default, although there
are GUIs and Web-based tools to provide a friendlier interface. In this
section we'll introduce the most common command-line operations, using the
Xsnow program for the
examples. If you would like to follow along, you can download rpm below,
which should work on most rpm-based distributions.
Note: If you find the various uses of the term "rpm" confusing in this
section, keep in mind that "rpm" usually refers to the program,
whereas "an rpm" or "the rpm" usually refers to an rpm package.
