RPM Software Packages
 

Do all linux distros support rpm packages and the "urpmi" commands, or is it just the Mandrakes and Fedoras? Just wondering.

No not all distros support RPM or URPMI. Fedora ( Red Hat ) uses RPM ( Red Hat Package Manager ) and Mandriva uses the URPMI set of commands to support Mandriva packages. There are other distros that have package managers.

Slackware for intstance does not use a package manager. Slackers download tar files and compile their own executables. You can do that on distros that have package managers also. It is not recommended though. You have to look after pre-reqs and dependencies yourself. That is quite a task.

Hope this helps.

Urpmi is a Mandriva (and derivatives) specific tool that extends the functionality of rpm. It works in conjunction with rpm, so is not an entirely seperate tool. There are not many distros that use urpmi, some Mandriva derivatives even use apt/synaptic instead of urpmi.

It is not 100% true. Slackware has its own package manager using specific
slackware packages. The Slackware distro I saw has both source and binary
versions of each package. It is commonly not provided by RPM based distros, of
course they have so called SRPMs but in a far less number than RPMs.
The structure of Slackware packages is very simple. All files, which package
should contain, are tar.gz'ipped as they are. Also it contains a descriptive
file and some scripts if they are needed. So Slackware packages provides all
RPMs features except dependencies! Yes Slackers have to look for dependencies
on their own! It is incomfortobale :) But Slackware is a great distro anyway
because of other its features.

My distro based on its own debian packages. IMHO it is the most comfortable
package system. It have too much features, like automatically remove packages
that are not yet required by others, or packages wich are suggested but not
required by the installed, so you can install them or not, and so on.
The distro without precompiled packages, when user have to build them from
source (but it does not mean there is no package manager, simply no packages
with precompiled application), is Gentoo.