Yes, rpm is the default package manager for Mandrake. Actually, it is safe to say it is the package manager for almost all the major distributions including: Red Hat, Mandrake, Turbolinux, Open Linux, Suse, and some others I haven't mentioned. DDebian and Slackware are the only ones I know of that don't use rpm as the default package manager. Second, reason for using rpm is once I get a standard kernel made for Mandrake 8.2 all someone will need to do is download the packages and run an rpm -Uv filename.i586.rpm and it will upgrade your existing kernel with my speakup one.
