RPM How-To for end users

Basic informations for end users about installing, upgrading and removing packages with RPM and YUM.

RPM Website: ​http://www.rpm.org/

YUM commands MAN page: ​http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/yum8.html

Platform selection for binaries

The default base architecture setting for RPM/YUM is the i386 platform; if you own a i686 CPU (PentiumPro and above), you can tell YUM to inspect i686 package list first, and fallback to i386 if none found. To enable i686, create a 'platform' text file in your %UNIXROOT%\etc\rpm directory with the following text in it:

i686-OS/2-OS/2

Binaries are getting built also for Pentium4 and above processors, use the following text to enable this:

pentium4-OS/2-OS/2

Access to pentium4 packages requires the latest YUM package.

Note about upgrading from 2010 RPM builds

Newer RPM builds are now using Berkeley DB for storing package informations, while previous builds were using SqLite 3 for this task. Since SqLite support is being phased out, RPM moved to BDB. After updating you need to convert the old database to the new format: you can check this running

rpm -qa

at the command prompt; you will get a SIGSEV error or a message about wrong database format:

[E:\]rpm -qa
rpmdb: __db_meta_setup: /@unixroot/var/lib/rpm/Packages: unexpected file type or
 format
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Invalid argument (22)
error: cannot open Packages database in /@unixroot/var/lib/rpm
rpmdb: __db_meta_setup: /@unixroot/var/lib/rpm/Packages: unexpected file type or
 format
error: cannot open Packages database in /@unixroot/var/lib/rpm

To upgrade the database, use the following command sequence:

rpm --define '_dbapi 4' --rebuilddb
mv /@unixroot/var/lib/rpm /@unixroot/var/lib/rpm.bak
mv /@unixroot/var/lib/rpm.rebuild /@unixroot/var/lib/rpm

You can test operation running

rpm -qa

you will get the list of installed packages. The older SqLite databases are now saved into mv /@unixroot/var/lib/rpm.bak, if everything is ok you can delete this directory.