Saturday, December 17, 2005

Yummy yum

One of the things that pushed me to upgrade to Fedora Core 4 was suspense of the automatic updates from the Red Hat Network a while ago. It seemed as though every time I wanted to install something I needed to search out the correct RPMs and install them before I could intstall the software I originally wanted to install.

FC4 opened my eyes to a totally new updating method; yum. I did a quick search and found The Unoffical Fedora FAQ which walked me through setting up yum and installing software for it. I installed the updated gcc compiler using yum and it only took a couple minutes to download gcc and any dependencies. "Wow, this is easy", I thought to myself, so I used yum to update OpenOffice.org to 2.0. This is definitely a nice tool to keep some of your general software up to date.

I don't think I'll use yum to keep my main database software updated. For example, I'm going to be doing research on having multiple versions of MySQL on the same system. During this research, I'm going to put MySQL 4.1 in one directory and 5.0 in another. I don't want my 4.1 software automatically updated until I want it updated.

I wonder if Oracle has a yum repository for Oracle Applications? (If you deal with Oracle Apps, you know what I'm talking about).

I think this will be a big time-saver.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like fedora's version of Gentoo's portage. Gentoo has had this functionality for ages

Jeff Hunter said...

Yeah, I'm sure it's been out there for a while, it's just that I used to use up2date. If I did some digging, I probably could have got yum to work with RH9, but it seemed like another good excuse to upgrade.

Anonymous said...

Not wanting to sound smug, but Debian has had this for many a year;

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade

for grabbing the latest goodness. If you want to install a specific module then;

apt-get install module-name

See - http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/index.en.html

Jeff Hunter said...

Not wanting to sound smug, but Debian has had this for many a year

As the name of the blog says, "So What?".

Jeff Hunter said...

howard j. rogers said...
...friends with the Stanton Finley guide on configuring Fedora.


That is a very good site, I will be visiting frequently. Thanks for the top.

Noons said...

if only Oracle came up with an equivalent for its rdbms on Linux.

I'm sick and tired of the "download this and that patch" everytime I want to do anything out of the square!

Ah well, there is a new year coming, I'm sure it's all gonna happen this time around...