The yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) tool was a rewrite of another tool called yup (Yellowdog UPdater). It’s just an RPM-based package manager, good for installing and removing software (including dependencies) from one’s system in a safe, easy manner. People liked it, it eventually just became “the thing to use” on RPM-based systems (such as Fedora and family, Yellow Dog itself, and tons others). Their homepage is at yum.baseurl.org. Repositories To function, Yum relies on repositories (‘repos’ for short) which are locations online that store RPM packages.

RPM has been around since 1997, per Wikipedia. Originally was known as Red Hat Package Manager, but now just stands for RPM Package Manager. Here’s a quick overview on it. RPM Archive Naming Scheme Example: <name>-<version>-<build>.<architecture>.rpm ----- xbill-2.1-6.fc24.x86_64.rpm The above is largely self-explanatory, but for clarity, the <build> field is for either the number of times the package has been rebuilt (I’m not sure how that’s useful) or it’s for indicating the specific distribution the package is intended for (very useful, IMO).

rpm2cpio and yumdownloader If you ever happen to want to get some files from an RPM to do whatever you want with them, you could: yumdownloader &lt;package&gt; rpm2cpio &lt;package.rpm&gt; &gt; file.cpio cpio -idv &lt; file.cpio # extracts from file.cpio all package files into the current working dir Pretty simple and small, but a good tool to have if you need it.

RPM = Redhat Package Manager YUM = Yellowdog Updater Modified Yum is different from APT in that it automagically does an update of the local cache when you’re checking a repository for whatever. Some YUM commands yum search yum info yum install yum remove yum provides # shows what package provided a particular binary, file, etc yum update Important paths: /etc/yum.conf # some configuration for yum, including the directory where repos are stored /etc/yum.

Sources lists found in: /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* Apt-get and apt-cache commands go hand-in-hand, whereas aptitude is new and kinda rolls them into one. There’s a script called: dpkg-reconfigure which can walk one through the initial setup of a package that they’d have found when they first installed a package.