Want to keep your Redhat/Fedora/RPM Based Linux system up to date? Well, here is ‘yum’ to the rescue.
yum (yellowdog updater, modified) has been developed by Duke University. Here is their definition of yum:
Yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages. It makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.
For the curious, you may type ‘yum’ and press enter to see a list of available arguments to run this program with. So, we want to check our system to see if there are any updates available. In order to ‘view only’ available updates, you can type: yum check-update
You will probably get a list of packages a mile long – these are updates to packages that are currently installed on your system.
Note: If you get an error message like: “Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: updates-released†– this most likely is because you are behind a proxy server and can’t reach the Internet directly. I just love those straightforward error messages :>) … To fix – type the following in at the prompt: export http_proxy=http://proxy:port and this will set an environment variable that many programs can use, including yum.
To go ahead and update your system type at the prompt: yum –y update . Note: If you don’t use the –y you will have to answer several prompts manually, which is not necessary.
After the update is finished, reboot the system by typing init 6 .
After the machine comes back up, you should now have a current, patched system. You can keep your system current by enabling nightly yum updates. To do this first you want to enable the yum service by entering the command: chkconfig yum on . Next, start the yum service by entering the command: service yum start .
Update your Fedora OS using yum
Want to keep your Redhat/Fedora/RPM Based Linux system up to date? Well, here is ‘yum’ to the rescue.
yum (yellowdog updater, modified) has been developed by Duke University. Here is their definition of yum:
Yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages. It makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.
For the curious, you may type ‘yum’ and press enter to see a list of available arguments to run this program with. So, we want to check our system to see if there are any updates available. In order to ‘view only’ available updates, you can type: yum check-update
You will probably get a list of packages a mile long – these are updates to packages that are currently installed on your system.
Note: If you get an error message like: “Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: updates-released†– this most likely is because you are behind a proxy server and can’t reach the Internet directly. I just love those straightforward error messages :>) … To fix – type the following in at the prompt: export http_proxy=http://proxy:port and this will set an environment variable that many programs can use, including yum.
To go ahead and update your system type at the prompt: yum –y update . Note: If you don’t use the –y you will have to answer several prompts manually, which is not necessary.
After the update is finished, reboot the system by typing init 6 .
After the machine comes back up, you should now have a current, patched system. You can keep your system current by enabling nightly yum updates. To do this first you want to enable the yum service by entering the command: chkconfig yum on . Next, start the yum service by entering the command: service yum start .