I do not understand how you derived that from her post which I quote below:
This is how my brilliant deduction worked :) (a selfdeprecating laugh - I agree it wasn't clear from her post) :
What is blas rpm for ?
She doesn't want to use blas since she doesn't know what it is.
Do I need it to run scilab on my SuSE 9.1 PC ?
She hasn't installed scilab since if she could run it she would post the question. Because of the previous question I assumed she learned of blas because of dependencies that gave her trouble. I googled for blas and scilab and installed it on my machine without problem from the non-rpm binary (I was interested to learn what the packages were). I agree that it's better to install from rpms if you can find working rpms but I haven't had too many problems installing rpms over source installations and vice-versa so I suggested she try that, Brana