A quick yum tutorial

If you’re using EEEDora on your ASUS EEE, then you’re going to want to know a little bit about yum.

Yum is Fedora’s software management system. In geek terms, it’s a wrapper for rpm that automatically retrieves and installs software packages. Yellow Dog Updater, Modified.

While the command list is vast, this is intended to be a quick tutorial to familiarize someone with yum.

Here are some basic commands (all done from a terminal window, of course!):

yum update
updates all installed packages

yum info package_name
Gets information specific to the supplied package name. Good to know what you’re going to install, or what the package will do to your system ahead of time.

yum install package_name
Installs the supplied package name. You will have to answer a few Y/N questions – typically you’ll answer ‘yes’.

yum remove package_name
Removes the supplied package name. Again, you’ll do the Y/N thing.

yum list installed|less
This tells yum to list all the installed packages. The | (pipe symbol) followed by ‘less’ just tells your system to paginate the results. Remember, “less is more”.  😉

yum list updates|less
This will tell yum to show you what packages need to be updated. It’s nice to do this before the ‘yum update’ command, so you know what to expect.

yum clean all
By default, yum is messy. It tends to leave behind extra files. So, every so often, it’s a good idea to tell yum to clean itself up.

The yum package tool is very easy to get a basic understanding of, and is quite a powerful tool once you get a hang of it.