This post is a follow up to the very useful articles posted by Cornelius on Yum usage. As you most certainly know by now, I am a debian/apt fan, but even so I had to work on several centos/fedora/rhel systems many times. One of the nicest features of yum I have found, is the ability to work with software groups. This has been very useful for me in several occasions where I had to clean up a wrong installation (removing a bunch of X related applications on a dedicated server for ex.). Removing several packages by hand would have been very time consuming, but so with just one command all the group (let’s say “X Window System”) can be removed, and with the dependencies also. Very cool!

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After my 2nd article on Yum, you should be well prepared for using 3rd party repositories, so here is the list I currently use myself for CentOS 4:

1.) Dag’s repository is my favorite on this list. It contains well tested and stable software for CentOS 4. Famous examples are up-to-date versions of the mailreader pine, spamassassin and many perl modules.

2.) Dries repository is also very useful for some multimedia stuff like mplayer. It also contains some alternatives to the Apache webserver like thttpd and lighthttpd which some of you might find useful.
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After covering the basics of Yum in my first article, let’s move on to the second part. In this article I’d like to cover some things about keeping your system up to date with Yum on a CentOS 4 system. But these information will also apply with little changes to any other system using Yum like Fedora Core for example.

Let’s begin with a scheduled update of your system: To activate an automatic nightly update, just enter these lines as root:
chkconfig yum on
service yum start


Yum will now check every night for new software versions in your configured Yum repositories and install them. If you didn’t configure any special repositories, at least the normal CentOS update repository is used, so you won’t miss any critical security updates.

But if you configured any 3rd party repositories (like many people do) you should keep the following things in mind: If you add more and more repositories to your Yum configuration, there is a high chance that important system files that were installed from official CentOS repositories (like base and update) are replaced by versions originating from your added 3rd party repositories.
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My first contribution to the site will cover some basics about yum (so Debian users can skip this, sorry for that). Yum is the standard package manager of CentOS and Fedora Core. It is used for maintenance of your software on your system.
Most common tasks are installing and removing software on your system. In the background yum can update all software and – very important – can solve software dependencies automatically (a thing, the simple RPM command can’t do). Solving software dependencies means: yum knows when program A needs program B to work and will also install program B if you choose to install program A.

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