i-am.ws

Yum Local Install

Yesterday I was trying to configure a music player on an old laptop running Fedora 8. It required some additional packages for mp3, but when I tried to do a "yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly" it appeared that this old stuff didn't exist anymore in any of the on-line repositories.

Luckily, pbone.net came to the rescue. I downloaded the RPM package, then tried to install, but there were a whole slew of dependencies that needed to be resolved first. Damn .... normally it means that one-by-one you've to search the net to figure out which RPM includes that specific shared library and then the result is often even more unresolved dependencies.

Don't know why, but I checked the man-page for yum and found that there is a "localinstall" command. What it does is that you use yum to install an already downloaded rpm package, but it will then use the on-line repositories to resolve the dependencies. Kind of "best of both worlds" approach.

# yum localinstall gstreamer-plugins-ugly-0.10.8-1.fc8.i386.rpm

Of course you have to hope that not too many of the other packages you need has the same issue of having disappeared from the repositories. But luck was on my side yesterday. Couple of minutes later I had my Muine Music Player running and the MP3 music was flowing out of the speakers.

Posted at 11:04AM Mar 21, 2010 by WWWillem in Software  |