[Novalug] Confusion about installing packages.

Julia Christianson juliac@patriot.net
Tue Jan 30 23:06:07 EST 2007


James (Jim) Darlack wrote:
> Hi Gang,
> 
> Well.. my CentOS Linux desktop is working for a week. Got a question.
> 
> 
> CentOS uses yum.  WHen I download a recent Linux application, and it
> is a tar file, should I use yum?  Or is yum for a specific type of
> Linux source file?
> 
> I clicked on a downloaded tar file, and an installer prompted for a
> directory. Oooops... I dont know what to specify.
> 
> Any help for this Rooky, is appreciated. Jim

Hi Jim,

Congratulations on your new install.

Some others have explained what to do with a .tar or .tar.gz ... but one
thing that hasn't been mentioned is that it's better to install things
with yum if possible.  It's easier, for one thing, but more importantly,
as long as you run 'yum update' regularly, it ensures you'll get the
security updates automatically.  With yum you're also less likely to
cause something else to break [as long as you stay with the
distro-approved repositories].  That kind of "breakage" can happen when
 something you install from source conflicts with something you've
already installed, or if you use a tarball to update something that was
already installed with yum (or directly with rpm).

You can find out whether what you're looking for is available from a yum
repository by (for example) typing at the command line

  yum list available|grep php

if you're looking for php or things associated with php.  (yum list
installed will show you what is already installed.)  The |grep part is
to keep you from having to sort through the whole long list of what's
available or installed but of course you can if you want to.  CentOS
comes with [most of] the official repositories already set up for you,
but not all of them are enabled by default.

You may find http://www.centos.org/docs/4/html/yum/ helpful; also
http://wiki.centos.org/Repositories
http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities may be a bit
more than you want to know right now but I learned quite a lot there --
as it happens I spent a few hours poking around the various CentOS
repositories this weekend; I'd be glad to send you my notes from that,
though I won't inflict them on the whole list.

-- Julia



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