Manage different architecture rpm on RHEL/CentOS

As the new RHEL/CentOS distribution allow to manage coexists different architecture rpms in the same machine with minimum fuss. It is also highly enhancement factor for the system administrators to look into the matter of package management on those distributions.

So in this article I am trying to give you a trick or two manage different architecture rpm on same machine efficiently.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you.

First of all you just cannot distinguish whether an rpm is a 32bit or 64bit...can you?? I don't think so by looking at it naked eyes.

So we need a mechanism to provide some sort information us to make us understand that it is an particular architecture rpm.

Here we go:

Step 1: :Please put this line into the .rpmmacro file like this:

cat >> ~/.rpmmacros
%_query_all_fmt %%{name}-%%{version}-%%{release}.%%{arch}

and then try to run the below command to get an information about any damn package installed in the system.

Now spare of thoughts that what you try to accomplish..if you want to install only the x86_64 bit packages then you need configure the /etc/yum.conf properly i.e exclude=*.i386 *.i586 *.i686

And even if you want keep the i386* packages and install the particular x86_64 version of some packages then do it below:

yum install packagename.arch

i.e

yum install mysql.x86_64

Hope this will help.

Bhaskar Chowdhury