What is an RPM and why does TinyOS use them for installation?
RPM is a package management system. RPM installs and uninstalls software. A .rpm file is an individual package. For example, mysoftware-1.2-1.rpm would install version 1.2, release 1 of the ‘mysoftware’ package. TinyOS uses RPMs to distribute TinyOS and it’s subcomponents and tools for several reasons: • It is a standard installation tool for the Unix platform and, thus, it is already familiar to many in the TinyOS community. • RPMs can be used on both Linux and cygwin/Windows. Though we officially only test and support RedHat 9.0, you might find that the RPMs work on other linux variants. • It allows us to package and, therefore, distribute each component in the TinyOS development environment individually. This makes it possible to release just the RPMs that have changed. For convenience, we offer an Installshield setup for the Windows platform. The IS setup automates the installation process as much as possible but under the covers the same RPMs are installed. If you’d like to find o
