Boston University Linux

Up until BU Linux 4.5 (Velouria), we used a program called "APT" to manage RPM packages. (And RPM packages are what BU Linux uses to make installation and remove of software easy — every program, from aalib to zsh, is packaged into an RPM.) APT comes from the Debian distribution and was ported to work with RPM by Brazilian Linux distributor Conectiva.

APT is a very good program, but it doesn't handle an important situation we need for BU Linux 4.5: it won't work on systems with mixed 32- and 64-bit programs, and we need that for our upcoming support of AMD64 and Intel EM64T processors. (These systems work perfectly well in 32-bit mode with the current BU Linux 4.5 release, but will work even better once we have the 64-bit version available later this summer.)

So, we've switched to a new high-level package management tool called "Yum". Like APT, Yum works to manage the RPMs on your system, and keeps track of dependency relationships automatically. In fact, if you're used to APT, you'll find yum very easy to pick up. From an end-user point of view, there are two key differences. First, Yum checks the network for updated information whenever you run it as root (preferably with sudo, of course). With APT, you had to use apt-get update to refresh package information. Second, APT has several different binaries, like apt-get, apt-cache, and apt-config — each with its own functions, like apt-get install packagename or apt-cache search querytext. Yum has just one binary, conveniently named "yum", and you use that do to everything.

You can read the manual page for yum for more information (type man yum), but here are some of the most useful commands:

• sudo yum install packagename
• sudo yum remove packagename

• yum search querytext
• yum info packagename

• yum grouplist
• sudo yum groupinstall 'Group Name'

Another common command is sudo yum update (or the slightly more powerful sudo yum upgrade) but with BU Linux, normally package updates are handled automatically, so you won't need this very often. Of course, if you've disabled automatic updates, you'll want to this whenever the automatic update program tells you that new updates need to be applied.

And speaking of automatic updates: the older APT-based automatic update system, aptomatic, has been replaced with a new Yum-based one called simply bulinux-autoupdate. This new system works almost exactly like the older one, and can be configured by editing /etc/sysconfig/bulinux-autoupdate.