Okay, sounds like you're asking 2 completely unrelated questions. Let me first explain what an RPM is. RPM stands for RedHat PAckage Management, which is pre-compiled packages that are easily installable, assuming they were compiled for your flavor of linux. They work fine in all versions of RedHat, most Debian, Slack, and some Mandrake. I've not tried many others (other than Gentoo, which doesn't use rpms at all).
Using the ./configure command is actually getting ready to compile a program. As I said above, when you use an rpm, you don't have to compile anything. ./configure checks to see that you have proper pre-requisites met (hardware, other software, etc. installed). Then you usually run a make, which compiles the program, followed by a make install, which puts the newly compiled program into the right directory. To run a ./configure for apache, download the source code, untar it, cd into that directory, and run the ./configure command. If you have any questions, feel free to IM me on AIM (JKHunholz)
