From LQWiki

Basics

If you have a Linux Distribution installed on your system, it doesn't only consist of the operating system itself, but of a lot of additional software, most of which you won't ever find out the actual use of. That's because many programs depend on others (see Dependency); in order to spare the users the hassle of finding out what depends on what, software authors and distributors take care of packaging their software, that is, making either all additional software available or, more conveniently on most systems since many applications share the same dependencies, delivering all information about the dependencies with the software itself - thus creating a software Package.

Package management

Software packages are in themselves quite helpful, but if they were only collections of several pieces of software, the benefit of having them would be limited - you'd still have to install every single portion of the package. package managers are applications that take care of the correct installation of whole packages.

But package managers can do a lot more than helping with resolving all dependencies: They can also take care of updates and upgrades, keeping your system secure and up to date. When you want to install software, you should always start doing it by means of your distribution, as described under installing software.

Some package managers:

• apt-get: Debian's package manager, used and ported to a varity of other distributions, most notably Ubuntu. apt-get itself is based on dpkg
• RPM: Red Hat's package manager, used by Fedora Core (Red Hat's heir distribution), SuSE/openSuSE and Mandriva, among others.

For each of those package managing tools, there are front ends (like available to make using them more comfortable - but they all show their full power only when used from the command line.

Additional Information

• Aptitude - a curses based front end for apt-get
• Synaptic - a popular front end, originally for apt-get, but sometimes also used with RPMs
• yast2 - a curses or gui based front end for SUSE RPMs
• yum - a cli for Fedora packages