In a review of Mandrake 8.0 at http://www.thedukeofurl.org/reviews/...rintable.shtml, the author says, "The Software Management package is an excellent piece of work and is geared towards installing software and satifying dependencies. This is one of the frustrations in using an RPM based distribution."

My question: What is an "RPM based distribution"?

It's a distribution that uses the Redhat Package Manager, which seems to be quite a few nowadays... You get applications as application.rpm then install them using the 'rpm' command. While I've never used it (being of the Slackware camp [although it does support it now {or so it rumoured}]) I've heard many people moan about nightmares with the dependency database being corrupt or invalid.

cheers.

Jamie...

I personally don't like RPM based packages, I prefer just the plain old tar.gz and I never run into any problems.

I've found that RPMs help to make sure that you've got the right default settings in place to get things running quickly, but it can put some of the necessary files in weird places.

For example, if you install Apache using the RPM it will put the web files under /var/www, the config files in another location, and the actual binaries in a third location. After fighting with it for about an hour I removed it and used the tar.gz to install everything under /usr/local/apache so I knew where I could find the things I was looking for.

If you're not familiar with Linux then the RPMs will get you running quickly, but if you like to customize everything it's probably more trouble than it's worth.

AFAIK, RedHat and Mandrake are two of the more widely used RPM based distros.