You ever run into this statement when you are already logged in as root? Quite confusing. I encountered it while installing Jive SBS on a Red Hat Linux 4.0 machine. I would run the installation script as rpm -ip jive-sbs-versionnumber.rpm and would encounter the error message. To continue I had to uninstall the failed installation of Jive using the following commands:

rpm -qa j* and then find the name of the jive installed package.
rpm -e jive-sbs_versionnumber
rm -rf /usr/local/jive

Afterwards, I successfully installed the application by running the command prepended with sudo.

sudo rpm -ip jive-sbs-versionnumber.rpm

What I come to find out is that the Jive application runs as the Jive user. All start | stop | restart commands are inteded to be run as the user “Jive”. You can run all of these commands as root by prepending them with sudo. Or you can change the password of the jive user to a password you know, login as the jive user, and then run the commands without prepending with sudo.