Mandrake 8.2 Coming soon.

[Thomas Ward]

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.