Securing-Optimizing-RH-Linux-1_2_149
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© Copyright 1999-2000 Gerhard Mourani and Open Network Architecture ®
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To move RPM binary in the floppy disk, use the command:
[root@deep /]# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy/
[root@deep /]# mv /bin/rpm /mnt/floppy
[root@deep /]# umount /mnt/floppy/
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To put RPM binary to his original directory, use the command:
[root@deep /]# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy/
[root@deep /]# cp /mnt/floppy/rpm /bin/
[root@deep /]# umount /mnt/floppy/
NOTE: Never uninstall RPM program completely from your system or you will be unable to reinstall
it again later since to install RPM or other software you need to have RPM commands available.
Why would we choose to use tarballs?
All the Red Hat distributions of Linux are provided as RPMs files. An RPM file, also known, as a
package is a way of distributing software so that it can be easily installed, upgraded, queried,
and deleted. However, in the Unix world the defacto-standard for package distribution continues
to be by way of so-called tarballs. Tarballs are simply compressed files that can be readable
and uncompressed with the tar utility. Installing from tar is usually significantly more tedious
than using RPM. So why would we choose to do so?
1- Unfortunately, it takes a few weeks for developers and helpers to get the latest version of
a package converted to RPMs because many developers first release them as tarballs.
2- When developers and vendors release a new RPMs, they include a lot options that often
are not necessary. Those organization and company dont know what options you will
need and what you will not need, so they include the most used to fit the needs of every
ones.
3- Often RPMs are not optimized for your specific processors; companies like Red Hat
Linux build RPMs based on a standard PC. This permit their RPMs packages to be
installed on all sorts of computers since compiling programs for an i386 machine can fit
on all systems.
4- Some time you download and install RPMs, which other peoples around the world are
building and make available for your purposes. This can pose conflicts in certain cases
depending how this man are build the package, errors, security and all other problems
describes above.
Compiling software on your system
A program is something a computer can execute. Somebody wrote the "source code" in a
language he/she could understand. That might have been C or some such thing. The program
"source code" also makes sense to a compiler that converts the instructions into a binary file
suited to whatever processor is wanted - e.g. a 386 or similar. A modern file format for these
"executable" programs is Elf. The programmer shows his source to the compiler and gets a result
of some sort. It's not at all uncommon that early attempts fail to compile, or having compiled, fail
to act as expected. Half of programming is tracking down and fixing these problems (debugging).
For the beginners there are more aspect and new words relating to compilation of a source code
that you must know, these includes but are not limited to:
The Multiple Files