Linux Help - Installing New Programs

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// Linux Help - Installing New Programs
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If you are using Red Hat or distributions that based on Red Hat, then you are going to use the RPM method.

rpm -i new_program.rpm
This installs the program (-i option for install)
rpm -q program_name
This “queries” your system to see if you’ve got a certain program installed. Let’s say you hear there’s a new version of the popular Internet browser Opera for Linux and you don’t know if your Red Hat based distribution installs this by default or not. Before you download the RPM for Opera, you could type the command: rpm -q opera. If you do have the package installed, it would give you the version number:

opera-5.0_whatever-number

rpm -e opera. This gets rid of Opera from your system. Then you would type rpm -i opera_beta8.rpm (or whatever the package is actually called). That installs the new version.

As I said, this is not the most efficient way to update packages. The usual way is to use the -U (as in Update command. You would type:

rpm -U opera_new_version.rpm