Software Packages
The Software Packages is a wonderful module that allows an administrator to perform software upgrades and package maintenence via a quite friendly interface. Though the actual implementation can vary quite a lot depending on which software packaging system your operating environment uses, the overall usage is similar. For RPM based Linux distributions, like Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, and Caldera, the package installation page looks much like the figure below.
Above you can see that the page tells you the name and version of the package to be installed, and provides a number of options for installing or upgrading the package. Usually, it is a good idea to use the Upgrade package option, because it will work, regardless of whether an earlier version of the same package is installed. A simple install will fail if an earlier version exists on the system. Normally, the defaults for all other options are recommended. However, it may be necessary to choose to Ignore dependencies and/or Overwrite package if dependency problems arise. Note that if you always install packages via RPM you will rarely, if ever, run into such a problem. It is far more likely when a system has several packages that have been installed manually via traditional configure; make; make install methods.