trbl installing an rpm

I just installed, on a new hard drive, not an 'upgrade', Suse 9.3. Note: it does not come with dosemu! I downloaded the rpm, and when I attempted to install it, I got the following error:   error: cannot get exclusive lock on /var/lib/rpm/Packages   error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Operation not permitted (1)   error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm Any ideas? John