Rpm Program Installation - Tips

Please Note: This is mostly for openSUSE Linux but can be applied to other Linux Distributions as well.

To install RPM files with Yast, simply type the following at the command line : yast -i blabla.rpm

Afterwards you can easily remove these packages from within Yast.

If you downloaded source code from a program (tar.gz files) you can quickly make an RPM file from it to install it later on your or another pc (if dependencies are OK).
To do this, first of all install the package checkinstall from the SuSE 9.x dvd (I don't know if it exists on other suse versions)..
Then unpack you source package and cd to the directory where you unpacked the tar.gz file.
Run the following two commands:

./configure
make

But now instead of running make install you run checkinstall.
Answer the questions, edit some values if they are not appropriate and let the program run.
When finished, you'll find your uninstalled RPM in /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i686

Now you can install it where you want with yast - i your_package.rpm or with rpm -i your_package.rpm. This allows you to easily uninstall it afterwards because it's impossible or almost impossible to completely uninstall packages installed from source.