However, what if the RPM isn't installed already? How do you figure out which one to install?

Fedora has well over 20,000 packages in the standard repositories without adding additional repositories like RPM Fusion. Narrowing that list down to find the package you want can be daunting, but you can use yum to help.

Consider this: you're following a guide online and the author says you need to run deallocvt:

# deallocvt
-bash: deallocvt: command not found

Perhaps it's in a package with deallocvt in the name:

# yum search deallocvt
Warning: No matches found for: deallocvt
No Matches found

This is where yum's whatprovides (provides works in recent yum versions) command works really well:

# yum whatprovides */deallocvt
kbd-1.15-11.fc14.x86_64 : Tools for configuring the console
Repo        : fedora
Matched from:
Filename    : /usr/bin/deallocvt

From there, you can install the kbd RPM package via yum and you'll be on your way.

Author's note: Regular readers will probably think this is pretty basic, but I often find people who don't know this functionality exists in yum.

UPDATE: I forgot to include another handy command in this article (thanks to Jason Gill for reminding me). If you have file on your system already, but you need to know which RPM package it came from, you can do this very quickly:

# rpm -qf /usr/bin/free
procps-3.2.8-14.fc14.x86_64

Locate RPM packages which contain a certain file is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

Thanks for following the blog via the RSS feed. Please don't copy my posts or quote portions of them without attribution.

Here are the steps for an upgrade from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14 via yum:

yum -y upgrade
wget http://mirror.rackspace.com/fedora/releases/14/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/fedora-release-14-1.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh fedora-release-14-1.noarch.rpm
yum -y install yum
yum -y upgrade

If you happen to be upgrading a 32-bit instance on Slicehost, simply replace x86_64 with i386 in the url shown above.

Upgrading Fedora 13 to Fedora 14 on Slicehost and Rackspace Cloud Servers is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

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To reduce the total data downloaded, I'd recommend installing the yum-presto package first. It downloads delta RPM's and builds them on the fly, which allows you to upgrade packages without having to download the entire RPM's.

yum install yum-presto

Now, upgrade your current system to the latest packages and clean up yum's metadata:

yum upgrade
yum clean all

Get the latest fedora-release package and install it (replace x86_64 with x86 if you're using a 32-bit system):

wget ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/12/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/fedora-release-*.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh fedora-release-*.rpm

Now, upgrade your system to Fedora 12:

yum upgrade

For detailed documentation on the entire process, refer to Fedora using yum on the FedoraProject Wiki.

Upgrading Fedora 11 to 12 using yum is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

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» What the Fedora developers suggest:

yum -y upgrade
yum -y install preupgrade
yum clean all
preupgrade-cli "Fedora 11 (Leonidas)"

Of course, if you're doing this on a Fedora desktop, you can use preupgrade (rather than preupgrade-cli) to upgrade with a GUI.

» The method I prefer (and it works properly on Slicehost):

yum -y upgrade
yum clean all
wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/11/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/fedora-release-11-1.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh fedora-release-11-1.noarch.rpm

At this point, you would normally just start upgrading packages, but the Fedora developers threw us a curveball. Since yum in Fedora 10 doesn't support metalinks, your upgrades will fail with something like this:

# yum -y upgrade
YumRepo Error: All mirror URLs are not using ftp, http[s] or file.
 Eg. /
removing mirrorlist with no valid mirrors: //var/cache/yum/updates/mirrorlist.txt
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: updates. Please verify its path and try again

It's easily fixed, however. Open up /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo and /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo in your favorite text editor and change the mirrorlist URL's like so:

Fedora Repository

#mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=$basearch

Fedora Updates Repository

#mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=updates-released-f$releasever&arch=$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=updates-released-f$releasever&arch=$basearch

Once you make those changes, finish out the upgrade:

yum -y upgrade

This process will take a little while to complete, but there shouldn't be any interaction required. Once it's done, change the mirrorlist lines back to the original values so you can benefit from the speedups provided by the metalink format.

Upgrading from Fedora 10 (Cambridge) to Fedora 11 (Leonidas) is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

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First, pull a list of RPM package by name only:

rpm -qa --queryformat='%{NAME}\n' | sort > server.txt

Once you've done that on both servers, just use diff to compare the two files:

diff serverold.txt servernew.txt

Compare the RPM packages installed on two different servers is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

Thanks for following the blog via the RSS feed. Please don't copy my posts or quote portions of them without attribution.

If you have an RPM-based linux distribution, you can use a spec file that is available on SourceForge. You can follow the instructions on the project's page, or you can follow these abbreviated instructions here:

Install some prerequisites:

// RHEL 4
up2date -i rpm-build wget ttmkfdir
// RHEL 5
yum install rpm-build wget ttmkfdir

Install cabextract.

Build the RPM:

wget -O /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
rpmbuild -bb msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec
rpm -Uvh /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.spec

Test it to be sure that they're installed:

xlsfonts | grep ^-microsoft
rpm -ql msttcorefonts

Installing Microsoft's TrueType fonts on Linux servers is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

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The errors:

rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries
error: db4 error(22) from db->close: Invalid argument
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Cannot allocate memory (12)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm

Make a backup of /var/lib/rpm in case you break something:

tar cvzf rpmdb-backup.tar.gz /var/lib/rpm

Remove the Berkeley databases that rpm uses:

rm /var/lib/rpm/__db.00*

Make rpm rebuild the databases from scratch (may take a short while):

rpm --rebuilddb

Now, check rpm to make sure everything is okay:

rpm -qa | sort

Why does this happen?
When rpm accesses the Berkeley database files, it makes temporary locker entries within the tables while it searches for data. If you control-c your rpm processes often, this issue will occur much sooner because the locks are never cleared.

rpmdb: Lock table is out of available locker entries is a post from: Major Hayden's Racker Hacker blog.

Thanks for following the blog via the RSS feed. Please don't copy my posts or quote portions of them without attribution.