Let me start by saying I am FAR from being an expert on the subject of building rpm’s… RPM’s are binary packages for use in red-hat based distributions. They are used (*in my case on Mandriva) with urpmi to install. Urpmi is a “wrapper” around the rpm utility that figures out what dependencies a program has and then installs those dependencies along with that program. One problem under linux is that binaries are not necessarily portable from one version of a distribution to another. For instance, some of the rpm’s for cooker may not be compatible with an old 10.0 system. But, there are src.rpm’s that can be rebuilt.