Following are a bunch of extraneous troubleshooting tips that you might find useful when you are working with RPM packages:
Check installed packages over 5 days-Once each day, a list of all installed RPM packages is created and copied to the /var/log/rpmpkgs file. You can refer to that list to see the full package name for each RPM package. The most recent 5 days of package are contained in the /var/log directory: rpmpkgs, rpmpkgs.1, rpmpkgs.2, rpmpkgs.3, and rpmpkgs.4. You can compare these files to see if any packages have been added, removed, or upgraded in the past 5 days.
Find packages most recently installed-Some software on your Linux system isn't working properly and you want to see if any software that has been added or upgraded recently might be the problem. Use the --last option to list your RPM packages in the order they were installed (starting from the most recent):
# rpm -qa --last | less gpg-pubkey-4f2a6fd2-3f9d9d3b Fri 06 Feb 2004 10:02:09 PM PST gpg-pubkey-e42d547b-3960bdf1 Fri 06 Feb 2004 12:49:58 AM PST acroread-5.06-4 Wed 04 Feb 2004 11:40:25 AM PST mozilla-js-debugger-1.4.1-18 Mon 26 Jan 2004 11:33:50 PM PST mozilla-dom- inspector-1.4.]-18 Mon 26 Jan 2004 11:33:43 PM PST
From this example, you can se that I installed two GPG public keys on Friday. Before that I installed the Adobe Acrobat reader and upgraded a bunch of mozilla packages. I could then page through the entire 1500 or so packages on by system, in the order they were installed.
Find what package a file is in-Locating what package a file, command, or library comes from can help you track down documentation or other components related to that item. The -f query option to rpm lets list the package associated with any file. For example,
# rpm -qf /etc/alternatives chkconfig-1.3.9-1
You see that the alternatives feature is included in the chkconfig package, which includes components to change system services.
Change an RPM to a Cpio archive-Convert an RPM package to cpio format by using the rpm2cpio command. Cpio is a standard utility for creating software archives and extracting files from those archives. By converting a package to cpio, you can essentially use the resulting cpio archive to copy the original contents of an RPM package to any Linux or UNIX system, or to extract a single file from an RPM package.