Managing Software with yum

This document presents basic concepts of software management on Fedora systems. It outlines the major functions of yum, the recommended software management tool for Fedora.

This document is intended for Fedora users of all levels of experience.

This document is a reference for using yum. You may wish to read some or all of the sections, depending upon your needs and level of experience. If you are a new user, read Section 2, “Software Management Concepts” before using yum for the first time. Experienced Linux users should start with Section 4, “Managing Software with yum”.

	Previous Versions of Fedora Core
	This document describes the configuration of yum on current versions of Fedora Core. You must perform the additional step noted in Section 7.2, “Manually Authorizing Package Sources” to enable yum on Fedora Core 3.

Most of the examples in this document use the package tsclient, which is included with Fedora Core. The tsclient package provides an application for remote desktop access. If you install it successfully you may start the application by choosing Applications → Internet → Terminal Server Client. To use the examples, substitute the name of the relevant package for tsclient. The example commands for Fedora package groups use the MySQL Database group.

	Avoid Logging in with the Root Account
	You do not need to log in with the root account in order to manage your Fedora system. All of the commands shown in this tutorial that require root access will prompt you for the root password. The example terminal commands use su -c to provide this facility.

Fedora Core includes a yum configuration that is suitable for independent systems with Internet access. You may use yum and related software on such systems without any additional configuration.

If your system is part of a managed network, consult your network administrators for advice. You may need to configure yum to use a network proxy server. Section 11, “Using yum with a Proxy Server” explains how to configure yum to use a proxy server. Administrators may also suggest or require that yum clients use specific package repositories. Refer to Section 7, “Configuring Access to Software Repositories” for instructions on how to configure access to repositories.

To improve performance and enable disconnected operations, activate the yum caches on your system. Refer to Section 10, “Working with yum Caching” for more information on the caching option.

The yum utility has features and options not discussed in this document. Read the man pages for yum(8) and yum.conf(5) to learn more, using the following commands:

man yum
man yum.conf

Other useful yum resources on the Internet include:

	Check Bugzilla First
	If you encounter a persistent error with a specific operation, visit http://bugzilla.redhat.com and review the bug reports for the package or packages involved. An error in a package may cause all yum operations that rely on that package to fail. Please file bug reports for Fedora packages, including yum, on this Bugzilla web site.