Yum

[daniel49]

Ok starting to play around with yum a little when I type yum list it gives me a list of like 884 items.
A) I seem to be able to see only n-z is before I get to the point where the scroll bar won't move up any more is there a way to see like a page at a time for instance in dos for a long directory I would have typed dir /p.
B)many of the updates I see...ok almost all of them, are things that I have no idea what they are or if I need them or what they do. How should one intelligently approach this ,besides just updating everything which would probably keep my dialup modem busy for months.
thx for the tips

 

[n0cmonkey]

a) yum | more

The | is a pipe. It pipes the output of the commands on the left side to the program on the right. more is a pager, it shows you a page at a time. less and probably most are 2 other pagers.

b) Look up the programs on freshmeat.net or something. I'm guessing there is probably a way to see what they do in yum, but I'm not going to look up the man page right now to find out.

READ THIS.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: daniel49
B)many of the updates I see...ok almost all of them, are things that I have no idea what they are or if I need them or what they do. How should one intelligently approach this ,besides just updating everything which would probably keep my dialup modem busy for months.
thx for the tips

Just update everything - this is not a good place to be tricky. Run the update command before you go to bed and let it run all night. After the initial update, future ones will be much quicker. I ran off of dialup for a long time - it's really not as bad as you think.

If, like some people, you have delicate sensibilities that are offended by seeing so many packages you don't understand then you can always remove those packages entirely, but don't let them sit there not updated. The package manager will warn you if you try to break a dependency chain. So, for example, if package B depends on A and you ask to remove A, the package manager will also remove B if you give it permission. This is actually a pretty useful way to start understanding the various Linux subsystems - if you ask to remove a package and it breaks a dependency for a whole screenful of stuff, then you know that it's a pretty important dependency. And it's probably something you might want to learn more about. It's also a really good way to hose your system if you make the wrong decision, so don't try it if there's any important data you need.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
a) yum | more

The | is a pipe. It pipes the output of the commands on the left side to the program on the right. more is a pager, it shows you a page at a time. less and probably most are 2 other pagers.

b) Look up the programs on freshmeat.net or something. I'm guessing there is probably a way to see what they do in yum, but I'm not going to look up the man page right now to find out.

READ THIS.

Using less is definitely easier than more I haven't seen most before, it's not installed on my fc3 machine...

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: kamper

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
a) yum | more

The | is a pipe. It pipes the output of the commands on the left side to the program on the right. more is a pager, it shows you a page at a time. less and probably most are 2 other pagers.

b) Look up the programs on freshmeat.net or something. I'm guessing there is probably a way to see what they do in yum, but I'm not going to look up the man page right now to find out.

READ THIS.

Using less is definitely easier than more I haven't seen most before, it's not installed on my fc3 machine...

More > *

 

[LBmtb]

Can also do
yum list | grep samba
If samba was the thing you were interested. This should bring up samba-common, samba-client, samba-swat, etc. Just use "| grep keyword" to sort your way through the long list if you have an idea of what you want already.

 

[Soffty]

download yumEX its a GUI installer/unistaller. *EDIT* and an updater.