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Managing Linux Software With yum and rpm

June 3, 2011

I have been planning to update this article to contain detailed information on configuring and using yum to manage Linux software. Sorry for the delay, but there are only so many hours in the day. For the moment, the best resource for learning about yum is the official documentation at Managing Software with yum. Meanwhile, here is some background on RPM, which is the technology underneath yum.

RPM is the Red Hat Package Manager. Red Hat invented the thing, so naturally you will find it in Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as their less commercial Fedora distro. It is also supported by S.u.S.E. Software gets wrapped up into these RPM packages that you can download from the Internet. You use the rpm utility to install them, and it keeps track of version information and changes made by the install so the package can be uninstalled or upgraded later if you choose.

The syntax of rpm is pretty simple. To install a package:

[root]# rpm -i ${packagename}

If you already have an older version of the program installed and you want to upgrade to a newer version:

[root]# rpm -U ${packagename}

Remember that Linux is case sensitive, that's an upper case U. So you installed the software, played with it for a while, found out it sucks. How to get rid of it?

[root]# rpm -e ${packagename}

There are also graphical front ends to the rpm utility for X11. Look in my section on the X Window System for a discussion of them.

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