I'm running RHEL 4.0 a Dell server (PE 6650), and I've discovered something: there are a few packages that are listed twice in the RPM database. an example would be glibc. I ran rpm -qi glibc and both packages get listed. Based on what I can see, one is x6-64 architecture (what I want) and one is i386 architecture. (I determined this based on the build host and checking Red Hat's site).

How they both got there is less important to me than how to remove the i386 package. They're both the same version (glibc-2.3.4-2.13), so I can't specify that way. If I run rpm --erase glibc-2.3.4-2.13, I get the following error:
error: "glibc-2.3.4-2.13" specifies multiple packages

Any suggestions?

(I found one related article that discussed removing multiple Quake packages, but I dont' wan to remove all of them, just one...)

Thanks in advance,
fiservguy

It's quite common and useful to have both x86 and x86_64 libs and other packages installed, for example since your query is about the glibc packages;

$ rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}.rpm\n' 'glibc*' | sort
glibc-2.3.90-18.i686.rpm
glibc-2.3.90-18.x86_64.rpm
glibc-common-2.3.90-18.x86_64.rpm
glibc-devel-2.3.90-18.i386.rpm
glibc-devel-2.3.90-18.x86_64.rpm
glibc-headers-2.3.90-18.x86_64.rpm
glibc-kernheaders-2.4-9.1.98.EL.x86_64.rpm

The x86 (i386, i686) version may or may not be required by your system, it would be a good idea to check first then remove if OK to do so. Notice the command I used to show you all the glibc packages installed and the full names of them.

So, first test if removing the x86 version of the would be OK, notice that the ARCH has added to the command being used;

$ rpm -e glibc-2.3.90-18.i686 glibc-devel-2.3.90-18.i386 --test

If you get no warnings back then you can remove the package(s) simply by removing the --test switch from the command in the example above. Otherwise it would be a good idea to leave them in place.

Thanks for the reply, Lenard.

I have seen some web pages say that multiple installs are at least not bad, but haven't seen that they can be beneficial. With your information, I should be able to remove the duplicates if it becomes necessary. So far, I haven't seen any problems, so I'll leave them until/unless something goes wrong.

Thanks again!

fiservguy

Well it is kind of hard to run some 32-bit applications without the 32-bit libs, since OpenOffice (for example) is only 32-bit you need the required 32-bit libs.