new to Linux

[Christofer C. Bell]

On Fri, 26 May 2000 verde at worldinter.net wrote:

> Ok So what is it?
> What is the right way?

You can do either way if you like, but the rpm -i command does simply
that, it installs an RPM.  It does not upgrade existing rpms.  The -U
option serves a two-fold purpose.  It will look to see if you have an RPM
already installed and remove it if you have it and then install the new
one in it's place (so you don't end up with 5 difference versions of, say,
gnapster installed, which I don't think would work anyway since you'll get
file conflicts).  If you don't have the RPM already installed, it will
simply install it for you.  

I use the -vh to give me a decent progress indicator when installing
software.  The -v prints the name of what's being installed/upgraded and
the -h prints a line of hash marks (#'s) for progress indication.

You know, I quit using -i for rpm about 2 days after I got Red Hat
installed for the first time since using -i is pretty silly when you have
-U to use.  Heh.

Another useful flag for rpm these days is -F which will only install a
given rpm file if you are installing it as an upgrade.  I use it to
install updates since I don't have to keep track of what I have
installed.  I just download the entire updates tree of updates.redhat.com
and go into the directory and do 'rpm -Fvh *.rpm'.  This is so much nicer
than generating a list of installed RPMs and then using your Mark I
eyeball to see what you need to update.

-- 
Chris