suse linux interview questions and answers

#yast –i - To install a new package
#rpm –qa grep apache - To check if apache package is installed or not.

The command:

rpm –qpl foreignpackage.rpm

will list the files that foreignpackage.rpm will install. For example,
SUSE does not offer an mpage package. If you examine the mpage package from the Fedora distribution in this way, the result is as follows:

#rpm -qpl mpage-2.5.3-7.i386.rpm
warning: mpage-2.5.3-7.i386.rpm: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 4f2a6fd2
/usr/bin/mpage
/usr/share/doc/mpage-2.5.3
/usr/share/doc/mpage-2.5.3/CHANGES
/usr/share/doc/mpage-2.5.3/Copyright
/usr/share/doc/mpage-2.5.3/NEWS
/usr/share/doc/mpage-2.5.3/README
/usr/share/doc/mpage-2.5.3/TODO
/usr/share/man/man1/mpage.1.gz
/usr/share/mpage
/usr/share/mpage/CP850.PC
/usr/share/mpage/ISO+STD+OTH
/usr/share/mpage/ISO-8859.1
/usr/share/mpage/ISO-8859.15
/usr/share/mpage/ISO-Latin.1
/usr/share/mpage/ISO-Latin.2

Through this output you can see that this installation is not going to interfere with any existing files on the system, so you can simply install the package with the command:

#rpm –Uvh mpage-2.5.3-7.i386.rpm


Extracting Files from Packages


The easy way to extract files from packages is with m c (midnight commander), a text-based file manager that has the nice feature that explores inside various types of archives and packages, including RPM packages. So if you start m c in a directory in which there is an RPM package

Working with Source RPMs

There will be occasions when a SUSE RPM of a particular package exists but not for the particular SUSE version you are using. If you are running SLES 9 on x86, you should be able to install a binary RPM taken from SUSE 9.1 Professional without any problems, because these two versions are binary compatible. But in many other cases although you may not be able to install the binary RPM, you may be able to take a source package and rebuild it according to your needs. In the simplest case, you would do this (as root):

#rpmbuild --clean --rebuild packagename.src.rpm

You will then find that in the directory /usr/src/packages/RPMS, in the subdirectory corresponding to your architecture (i586 if you are on x86), there is a brandnew binary RPM package that you can install. Again, you need to have the development tools installed for this to work.

Compiling Source Packages

You will very often find materials distributed as gzipped tar archives. These are files that will usually have names such as filename.tgz or filename.tar.gz. To extract all the files from this archive, copy it to an empty directory somewhere and use the tar command to unpack it, something like the following example:

mkdir unpack
cp filename.tgz unpack/
cd unpack
tar zxvf filename.tgz

Usually, you will then find that a new directory has been created with all the contents of the package inside—if you are lucky, there will be a document there giving you details about how to build the package. Very often (but not always) the way to proceed will be to do the following commands:

./configure
make
make install

You will need to have the development tools installed for this to work.