Downloading & Installing Software

Chapter 13

Maintaining the System

• Yum• Pirut• BitTiorrent• Rpm• Keeping Software Up To Date• Up2date• Red Hat Network• Wget

Packages

• A software package is a collection of scripts, programs, files, and directories required to run a software application.

• Software from your system can come in different packages– Rpm– Tar– GNU Config & Build System

yum

• Early releases of Red hat did not have a tool for managing updates

• Yellow Dog Updater , Modified (yum) is now included with Fedora

• Yum works with “rpm” packages

Repositories

• The yum utility downloads pakage headers and packages from servers called repositories.

• Fedora provides the initial repositories (repos). These are quickly mirrored around the world.

• Yum is configured to use these mirrors.

Configuring yum

• By default yum is configured to access the global mirrors and install updates as requested.

• There is no configuration needed unless you want to modify the repo that you are using (use an in-house mirror)

Using yum to update, install and remove packages

• Logged in as “root” you can run yum from the command line– “Yum update”– See p.478-9 for an example of the

output

Installing with yum

• New packages can be installed with yum– Yum install package_name

• In addition to working with individual packages you work with groups.

• If you are unsure of the groups you can use:– Yum grouplist

Installing with yum

• Unsure of a groups contends?– Yum groupinfo groupname

Other yum commands

• Check-update– Lists packages installed and list updates available

• List available – list all packages that can be installed from the yum

repositories

• Search word– Searches for a word in the package description,

summary, packager, and name

Automatic updates

• The yum service can be set to run nightly:– /sbin/servcie yum start– This will set the service

• To verify:– /sbin/chkconfig yum on

Pirut:add and remove

• GUI Package Install and Removal Utility

• KDE: System – Add/Remove Software

• GNOME – Applications – Add/Remove

BitTorrrent

• Hybrid Server / Client and P2P

• Efficiently distributes large amounts of static data – Fedora ISOs

• Requirements– BT client software curses– Firewall permission to

pass .torrent – Bandwidth

Wizard brings back Klaw!

BitTorrent-curses

• Textual BT client– Downloading a slackware ISO

rpm

• A utility and a package format

• Red Hat Package Manager (rpm) works only with packages tht have been built for processing by rpm

• It install, uninstalls, upgrades, queries, and verifies rpm packages

rpm

• Rpm can be used to install a new kernel– We cover this in ch.15

Keeping Software Up to Date

• Reasons to keep current– Security– Bug Fixes– Feature enhancement

Up2date

• The up2date utility utilizes the Red hat Network (RHN) Alert Notification Tool.

• When updates are available they are indicated by a pop up or light on the panel

• Up2date uses the similar approach as yum with repositories

Up2date GUI

• Up2date-config

RHN Alert Notification Tool

• Main Panel indictors:– Blue with a check mark

• All is well

– Red with an exclamation mark• Updates available

– Green with ½ arrows• System is downloading

– Gray with question mark• Indicates an error

wget

• Wget – utility is a noninteractive command line utility

that can retrieve files from the web– Wget http://www.redhat.com/filename

Summary

• Yum• Pirut• BitTiorrent• Rpm• Keeping Software Up To Date• Up2date• Red Hat Network• Wget