If you've never heard of yum, your probably overwork, and you should be. Installing programs on linux can sometimes be a huge undertaking. Whether you install from source code or you install using some fancy rpms, your going to run into dependencies, and requirements. Thats were yum comes in handy, you say install and it not only install your program but all the dependencies required for it. Its a beautiful thing. So I thought I'd run you down on how to use how as a client, installing, updating, removing programs, But also how to set up your own repository, which by the way is where yum gets its packages to install from.

Yum - The Client

The great things about yum, is it's so easy. say you want to install php, just do something like this.

yum install php

Its that easy. Yum will then build a list of requirements (if any) and give you a list of what going to be installed, then you can say yes, or no. Now lets say you want to install multiple programs. Like for instance php, mysql, and apache's web server. Just added spaces in between the names like so.

yum install php mysql httpd php-mysql

And again it will throw together a list and the whole yes/no thing. Updating is just as easy you just replace the word install with update,

yum update php

And yum will go and try to find a newer version and build a list of dependencies for the new version if any. Now if you want to update your entire system just type

yum update

Yum will then try to update as much as possible.