RPM-related tips and tricks

Creating your own rpms, or rebuilding src.rpms

First, you should not do this as an ordinary user. Set up an rpm environment in your home directory instead. It is easy, only two steps.

First step. Create a file ~/.rpmmacros that contains

%packager               Lars E. Pettersson <user@domain.invalid>
 
%_topdir                %(echo $HOME)/redhat

Second step. Create the directories to be used

mkdir -p ~/redhat/{BUILD,RPMS/{i386,i586,i686,x86_64,i686,noarch},SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS}

You can now rebuild packages with the command rpmbuild --rebuild --clean package-1-1.src.rpm The built binary package, or packages, may be found in the directories below the ~/rpm/RPMS/ directory.

rpm-related problems

In case of trouble with rpm or yum, try to remove the rpm database lock files, /var/lib/rpm/__db.00*, and rebuild the database.

rm /var/lib/rpm/__db.00*
rpm --rebuilddb

rpm

rpm is a package management command used by a number of different Linux distributions. The following tips and tricks should work at any of these.

Find old packages

To get a date sorted list of all installed packages, do

 rpm -qa --qf "%{INSTALLTIME} %{INSTALLTIME:date} %{NAME} %{VERSION} %{RELEASE}\n" | sort -r

How to get one file from an RPM

To list the contents, do

rpm2cpio sendmail.src.rpm | cpio -t

To extract a file, do (if a path is listed by cpio -t then you must include that path with the filename, do not forget the begining dot)

rpm2cpio sendmail.src.rpm | cpio -ivd FILE_FROM_LIST

See the RPM changelog

Almost all RPM:s have a changelog, that can be accessed with

rpm -q RPM_FILE --changelog

List all known gpg keys in the rpm database

rpm -q gpg-pubkey --qf '%{name}-%{version}-%{release} --> %{summary}\n'

See the status of the rpm data base

/usr/lib/rpm/rpmdb_stat -ch /var/lib/rpm

yum

yum is a utility that can check for, and automatically download, and install, updated rpm packages. More information about yum can be found at http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/

Find packages not listed in any of the enabled repositories

yum list extras

Do a localinstall without beeing prompted for a GPG-key

sudo yum shell
> config gpgcheck 0
> localinstall download/bla_bla_1.1-1.i386.rpm
> run
> quit