Additional repositories for Yum and their cohabitation
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Additional repositories for Yum and their cohabitation

yum comes by default with 3 repositories:

  • core contains exactly the same packages that are on your installation CD
  • updates the core packages but updated on a regular basis
  • extras semi-official repository maintained by volunteers (the community)

But you can - and should - add other (unofficial) repositories. The most important one is Livna, it contains a lot of multimedia stuff (graphic cards drivers, mplayer, videolan, xmms plugins…).

To add Livna to your Fedora Core 5, just type:

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# rpm -Uvh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-5.rpm

Personally I also use the Freshrpms repository. It’s a bit like Livna, but contains some stuff Livna doesn’t! Type this to add it:

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# rpm -Uvh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/5/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm

Now, the problem is that these repositories are sharing a couple of packages. For example mplayer is available in both Livna and Freshrpms. This can be a problem: each version may try to install itself instead of the other one. To avoid this, we’re going to set an exclude rule on Freshrpms, to tell it to ignore the mplayer packages (hence letting Livna taking care of these).

Go to the /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory. You’ll find a couple of .repo files there. That’s where each repository settings are stored. Edit freshrpms.repo and add this line:

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exclude=mplayer* ffmpeg*

Freshrpms’ packages beggining with mplayer and ffmpeg (another package shared with Livna) will be ignored by yum. Note that you can also set a global ignore (ignore a package name from any repository), editing the /etc/yum.conf file.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.