updating with yum (was: Need help: X GUI objects invisible)

[Jonathan Berry]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 21:53:38 -0500, Bruce Elliott
<belliott4488 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Jonathan Berry wrote:
> >A simple "yum update" will go out to the internet and grab the
> >necessary packages.  It will also update your entire system, which is
> >highly recommended as a lot has gone on since FC3 was first released.
> >It will take a while to download and install all the packages,
> >especially if you have a slow internet connection.  This also assumes
> >you have installed the gpg keys that you need.  Something like
> >rpm --import /usr/share/rhn/RPM-GPG-KEY*
> >should do the trick, I believe.  This is probably the easiest way to
> >get the updated packages.
> >
> That sounds like a good idea. I've been using apt on my Red Hat machine,
> so I'm used to that. Does yum work along the same lines? I had to set up
> apt the first time so that it pointed to the right URLs for rpm
> repositories and so forth. Is there a similar process for yum?
> 
> Can you point me to a how-to page or a FAQ on using yum?

Yes, yum does the same job as apt, it installs and updates packages
doing dependency resolution.  You can use apt if you want, I just
started using yum and it has worked for me.  There is also up2date,
which can use both yum and apt repositories, but since that is meant
mostly as a graphical program, I figured it wasn't worth mentioning :
).  There seems to be some good info here:
http://www.fedorafaq.org/#installsoftware
I would recommend not using the yum.conf there directly (actually, it
looks like it has been cleaned up since the last time I looked; still
see below for the "new" way to do things).  yum should be setup well
enough to update your system by the install (if you upgraded from FC2,
then it might still point at FC2 repos).  If you want to add extra
packages that are not in the Core, then you will need to setup those
repos.  With FC3, each repo should have its own file in
/etc/yum.repos.d/ that end with .repo (the old way still works, but
the new way seems to make more sense).  You can grab the repos you
want from the fedorafaq yum.conf and put them in their own file. 
Extras, Livna, and Dag seem to be good ones to add, see the fedorafaq
example for a good list.

> >If you just want to update X11, you might
> >try "yum update x11" and see if that works to get X working.  You'll
> >need to do a full update at some time, though.  This just might get X
> >working so things are a little more convenient.
> 
> I'll probably try to do a complete update, since this is a fresh
> install, and I don't really have anything to lose, except a little time.
> If I do run into trouble, then maybe I'll try just updating X,
> especially if there's a good GUI front-end for yum that makes life
> easier (?). apt has Synaptic, but I never really use it.

There are a couple from what I have heard.  I haven't looked into them
any.  They are still in development I think.  yumi and gyum are a
couple of names I recall.  I found this for yumi:
http://dag.wieers.com/packages/yumi/
I think there are plans for the inclusion of a gui for yum in FC4. 
This is all just things I have seen in messages on the list.  up2date
has a gui, but I don't know if it works like Synaptic or not.  I've
only seen it used for doing updates, but I dropped it for yum after it
kept picking mirrors that were too slow (something that could have
been fixed with configuration, but I figured out yum first).

> >To answer your questions about getting the packages from SuSE, in
> >general, SuSE rpms will not install and work right on other distros
> >(sometimes not even other versions of SuSE).  There may be exceptions
> >to this, but they would be rare, and anything as complex as X11
> >probably would not be an exception.  Besides, the SuSE package is most
> >likely older as Fedora tends to stay on the cutting edge.
> 
> Okay, I was ready to ditch the SuSE idea, anyway.
> 
> BTW, I would have thought as you did, that SuSE would be less up-to-date
> than Fedora, but after all, X did work with this video card, which is
> why I'm assuming that this release (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8) has
> the more up-to-date version of X, at least.

Not necessarily.  Updates have been known to break things at times, in
both Linux and Windows, so if it works, it doesn't necessarily mean it
is newer.  I don't know much about the development of X11, but if it
is sufficiently slow between releases, then the newest SuSE (I'm not
familiar with the ES numbering) might have a newer X than the original
FC3 package.  If you have SuSE installed somewhere you can do an "rpm
-qa | grep -i x11" and see what versions you come up with and compare
them to Fedora.

> thanks for the help,
> Bruce

Jonathan