setting up yum on Fedora 7 (f7) for UCI users

warning

this page is for Fedora 7 only. click here for a list of yum setup instructions on other versions of Fedora.

introduction

once you've got your Fedora 7 system set up, the very first next step is to get it updated with all the latest versions of the system's programs. on fedora, these programs come in packages, called rpm's. to get all the latest/update rpm's, fedora uses a program called yum⁽¹⁾ to download the update rpm's from repositories -- specially configured FTP sites. there are many repositories around the planet which hold copies of the same update rpm's. these are called mirrors. thanks to the efforts of our own people over at NACS, UCI has a server set up with mirrors of the two most important repositories: fedora and fedora-updates.

obviously, it's better to download the new rpms from a yum repository mirror nearest you, since some of the rpm's can be large, and the network can bog down outside UCI. so for machines at UCI, this is ideal: your system will update itself quite quickly.

it is assumed you are doing all of the following as root.

point your yum to UCI

On campus
If your machine is here at UCI, or you're on the VPN, you do not need to edit anything in your yum configuration. Instead, the yum architecture will know automatically that UCI's repositories are the closest, and will connect to them. Note that this intelligence is only built into Fedora 7 (and later) and not any of the earlier versions of Fedora. Thanks to Mike Iglesias of NACS for setting this up with Redhat.
Off campus

If your machine is off-campus, and you still want to use the UCI servers (for whatever particular reason you have decided you want to do this -- perhaps because though you are off-campus, you still live geographically close to Irvine and you'd like to force the use of the UCI servers instead of some random machine elsewhere in the United States, in an effort to get faster downloads? or maybe you just want to model these instructions and set up your machine to use a different mirror, but in the same way?), then you can edit your 2 already-existing config files:
- edit your /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo file, commenting out the baseurl and mirrorlist lines and putting in the replacement baseurl for UCI, as below. do this only in the [fedora] section at the top (not any of the other sections):
```
[fedora]
name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/$releasever/Everything/$basearch/os/
baseurl=ftp://ftp.uci.edu/mirrors/fedora/linux/releases/$releasever/Everything/$basearch/os/
#mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY
```
- edit your /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo file, commenting out the baseurl and mirrorlist lines and putting in the replacement baseurl for UCI, as below. do this only in the [updates] section at the top (not any of the other sections):
```
[updates]
name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch - Updates
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/updates/$releasever/$basearch/
baseurl=ftp://ftp.uci.edu/mirrors/fedora/linux/updates/$releasever/$basearch/
#mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-f$releasever&arch=$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora
```

update your system

you can now update your system by downloading and installing all the latest versions of the rpm's on your system. (the first time you do this there will be many packages to update, and it could take quite a while, so just go get something to eat and let the system run and do its thing):

$ yum -y update

install other RPMs

any time you want a new rpm from one of the above repositories, you can just run yum to do so. yum will automatically download and install the rpm. you don't need to know which repository the rpm comes from. excellent, eh?

emacs:
```
  $ yum -y install emacs
```
voila! you have emacs now.
pine: if you read mail with pine on your machine, unfortunately pine is not published in the fedora repository. fortunately, however, it is available through a third-party repository, livna:
1. Go here and in the 2nd section from the top, called "Repository RPMS", click on the link that says, "Fedora 7 repository RPM". Download this .rpm file to your computer.
2. install the rpm:
```
$ yum -y install livna-release-7.rpm
```
3. Now you have added the livna repo file to /etc/yum.repos.d/livna.repo, as well as other files. So you are ready to use livna to get any of the additional packages available on livna. In this case, we want pine:
```
$ yum -y install pine
```

configure yum to automatically update your system daily

if you want to make yum run automatically, then perform these steps:

check that you have the yum-updatesd rpm installed on your system (and install it if it is not):
```
$ yum -y install yum-updatesd
```
check that the daemon (service) is on for runlevels 3 through 5:
```
  # chkconfig --list yum-updatesd
  yum             0:off   1:off   2:off    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off
```
if you get an off on any of the runlevels 3 through 5, then run this to turn yum on automatically each day:
```
  # chkconfig --levels 345 yum-updatesd on
```

edit /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf to tell the daemon how you want it to run. In my case, I changed this:

# automatically install updates
do_update = no
# automatically download updates
do_download = no
# automatically download deps of updates
do_download_deps = no

to this:

# automatically install updates
do_update = yes
# automatically download updates
do_download = yes
# automatically download deps of updates
do_download_deps = yes

don't be afraid to check into the fine manuals:
```
$ man yum-updatesd
$ man yum-updatesd.conf
```

footnotes

(1) for those who are not familiar with yum, here are some resources:

please write me at jas at uci.edu with any questions, suggestions, improvements or corrections. thanks. --jeff stern.