How to check available package versions in rpm systems?
yum For RHEL/Fedora/Centos/Scientific Linux
Provides the command list
to display information about installed and upgradeable (and older) packages.
yum --showduplicates list <package>
zypper For SuSE Linux
Can return a detailed list of available and installed packages or patches.
zypper search -s <package>
Adding --exact-match
can help, if there are multiple packages.
As a side-note, here is a comparison of package-management commands.
You can use rpm -qi <package name>
to have all information of installed package.
You can use below commands as well:
yum info <package name>
yum list <package name>
yum --showduplicates list <package name>
The other answers addresses how to get information about the installed packages on the system. To add to that, it is also possible to query the yum repository about available not yet installed packages in addition with the pkcon search
command from PackageKit, e.g.
$ pkcon search name xz
Searching by name [=========================]
Starting [=========================]
Querying [=========================]
Available pxz-4.999.9-2.beta.20100608git.fc15.i686 Parallel LZMA compressor using XZ
Installed xz-5.0.3-1.fc15.i686 LZMA compression utilities
Available xz-compat-libs-5.0.1-2.fc15.i686 Compatibility libraries for decoding LZMA compression
Available xz-compat-libs-5.0.3-1.fc15.i686 Compatibility libraries for decoding LZMA compression
Installed xz-debuginfo-5.0.3-1.fc15.i686 Debug information for package xz
Installed xz-devel-5.0.3-1.fc15.i686 Devel libraries & headers for liblzma
Installed xz-libs-5.0.3-1.fc15.i686 Libraries for decoding LZMA compression
Installed xz-lzma-compat-5.0.3-1.fc15.i686 Older LZMA format compatibility binaries
Installed xzgv-0.9.1-3.fc15.i686 Picture viewer
$
I assume PackageKit is written generic so that it works with apt repositories as well, although I have only experience from using it on my Fedora systems.