neeraj forced the electrons to say:
> what is the difference in the way the are added .to thre system.
> How do the differ ...
RPM: rpm -i file.rpm
tarball: tar zxf file.tgz; cd somewhere; ./configure; make; make install
> which shld be preffered...if both are there (i found rpm easy to setup )
> only one command .to set up ..
Which should be preferred is a question best answered by you. I find
the ease of administration of RPM its plus point (same would go for .deb
files, I guess), and the flexibility that tarballs offer its.
An RPM does a few configurable dependency checks - if package foo depends
on package bar, then it will tell you so. tarballs usually cannot do that,
even though their configure scripts occassionally can do some kind of
primitive dependency checking.
Check out www.rpm.org for additional capabilities of RPMs.
I usually make an RPM out of any tar tarball that I download. It is a
simple process, and helps the sysadmin in many ways.
> are rpm common for all types of linuxes ...(redhat /caldera/suse) etc
No. RPMs are used by a few linux distributions - RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE,
Trustix, Connectiva etc. Some others use .debs - Debian. Still others
stick to tarballs (sometimes specially archived) - Slackware. *BSD also
use tarballs, IIRC.
Binand
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