Problems with redhad package manager (rpm)

[David Stocks]

Hey all, much angst and confusion that only the good people at
freebsd-users can help me with (probably).

I've downloaded a version of MLWorks (and SML interpreter), and, hence this
message, things do not go well.  It's the RedHat linux version (which is
free by the way), which is just about 9 megs.  I know that FBSD supports
rpm to some extent, but, like, I had a little look see at the rpm man page
and typed in the appropriate command, and it isn't having any of it.

The file does work, (a mate got it running on SuSE Linux), and rpm
--checksig <filename.rpm> does seem okay (it claims "ml20rh50.rpm: size md5
OK"), but when I come to install the actual file (or do almost anything
else with rpm) it spews up a load of guff like:

failed to open //var/local/lib/rpm/packages.rpm

There's a good reason for this, I have a /var but nothing after that.  I
even looked at the result of rpm --showrc, which again listed a load of
directories that don't exist.

Now I can't help but feel there's something wrong with my setup of rpm, but
this is just as it came when I installed FBSD.  I have touched nothing,
indeed I've never used rpm before.  I do have the linux module loaded into
the kernel, but that's not really an issue until I can actually get it
installed in the first place.

I mean like, guh.  I'm using 2.2.6-RELEASE currently, since I've not quite
got round to getting 3.3 yet.  (Besides, I've all the raw beastly power of
a 486DX to play with).  Oh, yeah, I hear that the linux support has
improved drastically in the last 4 or so versions of FBSD.  This true?

Thanks in advance,
David Stocks
CS + AI undergraduate, Edinburgh University