Thursday, February 15, 2007

yum - 'yummy' package management for Fedora Core

As a Mandriva (aka Mandrake) user, I used to use urpmi to install, urpme to remove and etc2 for package management. As a Slackware user, I used to use slapt-get and in Fedora, I am learning yum. I love it but in commandline. Why? because it is faster that way than using the gui front-end. I don't know why but they need to improve its speed.

Some useful examples of usage :

Check available updates (without installing anything) : yum check-updates
Check updates and install : yum -y check-updates
Search for a particular package using wildcard : yum list "ogg*"
Installing particular package : yum install ogg-vorbis.blablaba.fc6.rpm
Upgrading a package : yum update ogg-vorbis.blablaba.fc6.rpm

Default repositories provided by FC6 is good enough but lack of commercial and copyrighted packages. You need more than that. Notable repositories are freshrpms and livna. I personally added freshrpms as one of the repositories used by yum to install xmms-mp3, mplayer, dvdrip and some other packages. Thus enables me to hear mp3 and watch movies. I just found out that adding fedora's update-testing repository is risky. Don't add it unless you want to live at the bleeding edge and could afford to lose all your data. :)

How to add 3rd-party repos?
Usually there are instructions on the websites on how to add their repos into your system or you can read my article on how to add livna and kde repositories. I read somewhere to not add both livna and freshrpms repos. Add ONLY one of them or conflicts of packages will happen. You have been warned!.

To add freshrpms repo, just run this command as root:

yum install http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/6/freshrpms-release/
freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm (all in one line.)

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