When coming from a Windows environment, you'll 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 the recently downloaded tool may have replaced some .dll-files with older versions without any warning. This is why the GNU/Linux community went a totally different way and created a software package management system to take care of all those 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 Mandrake Linux provides you with a graphical software installer: RpmDrake.
RpmDrake consists of four different tools, which you access through the Main Menu ( -> ) or via the Mandrake Control Center in the section : Figure 21.1
We recommend that you access RpmDrake via the Mandrake Control Center.