It is recommended that you keep your Linux installations updated with the latest components and patches. This can be achieved by updating the components from the Internet. The below process can be used to allow you to change your updates to a local repository.

Currently, we will just be using the standard mirrors for the core and updates. A list of optional mirrors can be found at http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html.

1. Log in as a normal user account. To do this, simply type your username in the box and hit the "Enter" key on your keyboard. Then type your password in the box and hit the "Enter" key again.

2. Run a terminal session. Do this by clicking on the KDE Symbol (Letter K in the bottom left corner). Go to "System" and then click on "Terminal". This will bring up a white command prompt. You may want to add a shortcut on your desktop for Terminal. This may be achieved by going to the terminal option in the menu, dragging it onto the desktop and then selecting "Copy here".

3. Switch to "super user" mode. Do this by typing 'su -' at the prompt and hitting the "Enter" key. You will then need to enter the root users password and hit "Enter" again. You will know that you are in super user mode because previously at the end of the command line there was a $ whereas now there should be a #.

4. Run yum update. Do this by typing yum update and then hitting "Enter". You may wish to use yumex for your updating which is detailed further on this page. During the installation of the updates, you will be required to hit yes to continue the installation process of updates. "Note" this process may take a few hours, depending on machine and network speed.

5. After "yum update" has finished, you will need to reboot the system for the system updates to take effect. Make sure you are still the root user. To do this type reboot and hit "Enter". This will reboot the system.

Additional Repositories

As part of your installation of Fedora 8, you might wish to include the rpmfusion repository. This repository contain additional software and drivers.

For example:

• Nvidia display drivers

• Mplayer

• VLC

• Various media players and plugins

To install this repository, you simply run the following command :

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

Yum Extender

A piece of software that makes it very simple to update, install and remove software is Yum Extender which is known as yumex. It is basically a graphical user interface for yum.

To install yumex, start up a terminal session and as root issue the following command :

yum install yumex

As you can see from the images below, the program is quite intuitive.

You can select all packages to update, or simply select the particular packages you wish to update. Once you have selected the packages, click on the Add to Queue button to begin the update process.

• By clicking on "Available", you can easy search for a particular program/application by typing something into the filter section and hitting the enter button. For this example gkrellm was used (Which, by the way is a good tool to be able to watch your cpu, memory and such usage). By selecting the packages and clicking on the Process Queue button, the selected packages will be processed.

Simply click on the OK button to install the package.

• To remove a piece of software on your computer is basically the same process as installing software when using yumex. Firstly, select the "Installed" option, then select the package/s you would like to remove and then place the request in the queue.

login or register to post comments