Chapter 5. Package Management
One of the advantages of Fedora is the huge amount of software available for it. Finding, installing, updating, and removing this software can be a daunting task, simply due to the amount of software available.
Fortunately, Fedora uses a software management system called RPM Package Manager or simply RPM (formerly RedHat Package Manager). RPM rolls all of the programs, scripts, documentation, configuration files, and data used by a piece of software into a single file called a package. The package also contains metadata describing the package, license, maintainers, and the packages upon which the package depends (for example, a KDE application will need other components of the KDE system to operate).
What RPM doesnât provide is dependency resolution: the ability to automatically resolve dependency issues. However, the yum system builds on RPM to provide this capability, automatically searching external repositories to find needed packages and install them automatically.
Tip
In this chapter, the sections Lab 5.1, âQuerying the Package Management Databaseâ and Lab 5.2, âInstalling and Removing Software Using RPMâ deal with individual package management from the command line. If you want to go directly to the simplest and most comprehensive way of managing software packages, skip to Lab 5.3, âUsing Repositories.â
Get Fedora Linux now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.