If you are coming from a Windows environment, you will know the problem, that every piece of software has its own method of installation: either a MSI file, an InstallShield setup, a self extracting executable or maybe simply a zip file. When installing software you always risk ending up with some of your applications not working anymore, as a recently downloaded tool may have replaced some .dll-files with older versions without warning you. This is why the GNU/Linux community went a totally different way and created software package management systems to take care of these problems: rpm. As always under GNU/Linux this is a command line tool, with lots of nice features, but maybe a bit overloaded for the average user. Therefore Mandrakelinux provides you with a graphical software installer: Rpmdrake.
Rpmdrake consists of different tools, which you access choosing one of the entries of + + in the main menu or by clicking on Software Management in the Mandrakelinux Control Center (see Figure 20.1, “Software Management in the Mandrakelinux Control Center”).
We recommend that you access Rpmdrake via the Mandrakelinux Control Center.