Linux® and Windows® Interoperability Guide

Package Management

We use the term package management to describe editing an installed Linux system. Linux administration is another term. Maintenance could mean adding or changing scripts or configuration files. This kind of low-level administration is outside the scope of this book.

Most often, we're interested only in adding a new package or feature, or removing a package. This resembles a mini-installation, except that we're installing or upgrading a service or application instead of the entire system. We're going to discuss how to upgrade or add a package.

There are four forms of Linux packages:

• Tape archive (tar) files of built binaries, often gnu-zipped (*.tar, *.taz.gz, or *.tgz).

• Tar file of the source tree, often gnu-zipped (*.tar, *.taz.gz, ...