The Windows installer and the Unix tarballs are developer kits that provide everything necessary for you to develop applications with Ice, including header files, pre-compiled shared libraries, Slice compilers, and executables for services such as IceGrid. The Windows installer also includes the source code for sample programs as well as debug versions of the Ice run time libraries.
Sample programs for Unix platforms are provided as a separate source tarball.
The RPM distributions are different than the monolithic distributions of other platforms. Packaged using standard RPM conventions, these distributions include separate run time and developer kit RPMs for each language mapping. For example, the ice-java RPM contains the Ice for Java run time (Ice.jar), while the ice-java-devel RPM contains development tools such as the Slice-to-Java compiler. Additional RPMs are provided for third-party dependencies that are not included in the Red Hat distribution, or whose versions are out of date, such as Berkeley DB.
Regardless of the platform, we do not recommend using Ice developer kits as a way of installing the Ice run time components required by your application because the majority of what is installed by a developer kit is irrelevant to end user applications. The RPM distribution, however, is packaged in such a way that you may find it convenient to simply redistribute select Ice run time RPMs along with your application.