rootninja

If you have access to YUM, YAST, APTITUDE, or other such package manager, you can generally rely on these tools to sort out dependencies for you. In a modern day linux system, you can just install a package and all the dependencies are figured out, downloaded, and installed for you.

But what if your system is disconnected from the world. What if your network is a stand-alone network with no access to repositories and external stores of packages. You might need to look at an RPM file and figure out what it needs, retrieve it by hand, and install the packages yourself.

$ rpm –query –package –requires xpad-2.14-2.fc8.ppc.rpm
or simply:

$ rpm -qpR xpad-2.14-2.fc8.ppc.rpm

/bin/sh
/bin/sh
hicolor-icon-theme
libICE.so.6
libSM.so.6
libatk-1.0.so.0
libc.so.6
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.0)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1.3)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3.4)
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4)
libcairo.so.2
libdl.so.2
libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0
libgdk_pixbuf-2.0.so.0
libglib-2.0.so.0
libgmodule-2.0.so.0
libgobject-2.0.so.0
libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
libpango-1.0.so.0
libpangocairo-1.0.so.0
rpmlib(CompressedFileNames) <= 3.0.4-1
rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix) <= 4.0-1
rtld(GNU_HASH)

You don’t need to be root to use the rpm query commands. But you do need root privileges to install rpms.

$ rpm -Uvh zvbi-fonts-0.2.30-1.fc8.ppc.rpm

error: can't create transaction lock on /var/lib/rpm/__db.000