3. General Information

Contents of this section

3.1 Acquiring RPM

The best way to get RPM is to install Red Hat Commercial Linux. If you don't want to do that, you can still get and use RPM. It can be acquired from any Official Red Hat Mirror. Some of those are: 

FTP Site                Directory
========                =========
ftp.pht.com             /pub/linux/redhat
sunsite.unc.edu         /pub/Linux/distributions/redhat
sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk    /packages/linux/sunsite.unc-mirror/
                                distributions/redhat/redhat-2.0
ftp.cms.uncwil.edu      /linux/redhat
ftp.wilmington.net      /linux/redhat
ftp.caldera.com         /pub/mirrors/redhat
ftp.lasermoon.co.uk     /pub/distributions/RedHat
ftp.cc.gatech.edu       /pub/linux/distributions/redhat
uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu  /pub/systems/linux/distributions/redhat
ftp.ibp.fr              /pub/linux/distributions/redhat
ftp.gwdg.de             /pub/linux/install/redhat
ftp.uoknor.edu          /linux/redhat
ftp.msu.ru              /pub/Linux/RedHat
linux.ucs.indiana.edu   /pub/linux/redhat
ftp.cvut.cz             /pub/linux/redhat
ftp.ton.tut.fi          /pub/Linux/RedHat
ftp.funet.fi            /pub/Linux/images/RedHat
We are unsure at this point where to find it past there, but it will most likely just be a directory called RPM. We will make a tar file available with a README containing all the install instructions you should need.

3.2 RPM Requirements

The main requirement to run RPM is Perl 5.x. All of RPM is written in Perl. You must also have a working copy of cpio and gunzip, which most Linux distributions have now. While this system is intended for use with Linux, it may very well be portable to other Unix systems who meet the above conditions. Be warned, the binary packages generated on a different type of Unix system will not be compatible.

Those are the minimal requirements to install RPMs. To build RPMs from source, you also need everything normally required to build a package, like gcc, make, etc.

Next Chapter, Previous Chapter

Table of contents of this chapter, General table of contents

Top of the document, Beginning of this Chapter