Software update does not work in FEdora 5

diptanu · #1 7th May 2006, 08:00 AM

Hi friends....
I installed fedora 5 in my laptop...when i go for ADD/REMOVE software option ....it says...UNABLE TO RETRIEVE PACKAGE INFORMATION...and also wen i tried to install real player....it said...unable to open shared libstdc++....
please help me out...
thanks...

***bob*** · #2 7th May 2006, 12:23 PM

Use yum to do your updates and to add or remove software: http://www.fedorafaq.org/#installsoftware

daihard · #3 7th May 2006, 05:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bob

Use yum to do your updates and to add or remove software: http://www.fedorafaq.org/#installsoftware

Fedora Core 5 has its own GUI frontends to yum - pirut and pup, as you may already know. I suppose the OP is using pirut. Using yum via terminal will give you more information such as the detailed error message.

***bob*** · #4 7th May 2006, 09:03 PM

Hi Daihard. Yes, yumex is a favorite of mine too and will make an excellent addition. 'Yum install yumex' will get it for you. As to pup....well you can use it for updates, but it's in it's infancy and certainly not as good right now as the other alternatives (in my humble opinion).

daihard · #5 7th May 2006, 11:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bob

Hi Daihard. Yes, yumex is a favorite of mine too and will make an excellent addition. 'Yum install yumex' will get it for you. As to pup....well you can use it for updates, but it's in it's infancy and certainly not as good right now as the other alternatives (in my humble opinion).

That's true. One thing I don't understand is why Red Hat decided to have two separate apps to do update and add/remove. They could have had one application do both, just like yumex.

While we are here... would you mind helping me out a bit? Does yum have the ability to pick the locally stored RPMs for dependency when you do "localinstall/localupdate"? For instance, I have A-i386.rpm and B-i386.rpm stored in /home/daihard/temp. A depends upon B (i.e. B is needed in order to update A).

Now if I run "yum localupate A" from within /home/daihard/temp, yum still looks for B-i386.rpm on the Internet instead of the directory itself first. Is there a way to configure yum so it will first look at the local directory?

TIA,
Dai

***bob*** · #6 8th May 2006, 01:59 AM

Well, according to the 'man yum', here's the situation:

localupdate
Is used to update the system by specifying local rpm files. Only
the specified rpm files of which an older version is already
installed will be installed, the remaining specified packages
will be ignored. If required the enabled repositories will be
used to resolve dependencies.

So, I guess if you used 'yum --disablerepo=updates localupdate programname' it might accomplish what you're trying for. OR... why not download the updated version and then use 'rpm -Uvh programname'? Sometimes yum isn't the right tool.

daihard · #7 8th May 2006, 02:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bob

So, I guess if you used 'yum --disablerepo=updates localupdate programname' it might accomplish what you're trying for. OR... why not download the updated version and then use 'rpm -Uvh programname'? Sometimes yum isn't the right tool.

Thanks for the quick reply. I'll give that a try the next time I'm in the same situation. The reason I want yum to look at the local current directory first is because I have a bunch of large update packages on a DVD. When I installed FC5 on a computer at work, I used this DVD to update packages. The Internet connection at work is a lot slower than at home, so I wanted to avoid using the Internet as much as possible.

So I downloaded all the update files that I could think of that were very large at home and burned them onto the DVD. Of course I didn't know all the dependencies off the top of my head, but my rationale was that if I had all the large files locally, then whatever other files needed for dependency resolution, which yum would have to download via netowrk, would be rather small and therefore not disrupt the update operation too much.

In the end, it did not work that way. I'd think it's easy to change yum so it will first look at the local current directory when "localupdate" or "locainstall" is specified. Maybe I should look to doing that myself...

u-noneinc-s · #8 8th May 2006, 04:50 AM

daihard: I believe you can use yum localinstall (or localupdate) /path/to/updates/*.rpm, and it will (should) evaluate all those
files before going out and looking for deps. I have not "completely" tried this as at the moment I have nothing to install/update
locally, but I did "dry-run" it and it parsed all the local files, then I canceled the request. It looked like it would work. It will accept the wildcard(s).