Fedora Linux

The yum-updatesd service polls your configured repositories at regular intervals to determine if updates are available for any of your installed packages. By altering the configuration file, you instruct yum-updatesd to install the updated packages that it finds (effectively performing a yum -y update at regular intervals).

5.5.3. What About...

5.5.3.1. ...downloading but not installing updates?

By enabling the do_download and do_download_deps options, you can configure yum- updatesd to download available updates and related dependencies without installing them. This enables you to review the list of updates using Pup and then install selected updates without further download delay.

To set this up, configure /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf with these options:

# automatically install updates
do_update = no
# automatically download updates
do_download = yes
# automatically download deps of updates
do_download_deps = yes

5.5.3.2. ...updating a machine when it's booted?

The yum-updateonboot package can be used to update a machine whenever it is turned on. This ensures that security patches are automatically applied before the system is used. yum-updateonboot can be activated in addition to the automatic 4 a.m. update.

You can install and configure yum-updateonboot with these commands:

# yum install yum-updateonboot
Setting up Install Process
...(Lines snipped)...
================================================================= ====
Package Arch Version Repository Size
================================================================= ====
Installing:
yum-updateonboot noarch 0.3.1-1.fc4 extras 5.1 k
Transaction Summary
================================================================= ====
Install 1 Package(s)
Update 0 Package(s)
Remove 0 Package(s)
Total download size: 5.1 k
Is this ok [y/N]: y
...(Lines snipped)...
Installed: yum-updateonboot.noarch 0:0.3.1-1.fc4
Complete!
# chkconfig --add yum-updateonboot
# chkconfig --level 2345 yum-updateonboot on

You can configure yum-updateonboot to reboot the system if any of the updates involve the kernel. Edit /etc/sysconfig/yum-updateonboot and activate the line highlighted here by removing the pound sign ( # ) at the start of the line:

# IF any of these rpms are updated, the yum-updateonboot init script will
# reboot immediately after the yum update. To keep yum-updateonboot from
# rebooting the system, comment this line out.
REBOOT_RPMS='kernel kernel-smp'
# A list of groups that should be updated at boot. For each group mentioned
# yum-updateonboot will call 'yum -y groupupdate' Since group names tend to
# have spaces in them, used a semi-colon to separate the group names
#GROUPLIST='My Group;MyOtherGroup;Some_Group;My Group 4'

5.5.4. Where Can I Learn More?

? The yum home page: http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/

? The yum-updateonboot README file: /usr/share/doc/yum- updateonboot-0.3.1/README (install yum-updateonboot first)

5.6. Installing From Source

Although there are thousands of packages available in RPM format ready to be installed on a Fedora system, there is a lot of open source software ( http://opensource.org ) that hasn't been packaged into RPMs. This software can be compiled and installed directly from the source files.

5.6.1. How Do I Do That?