Managing Software With Yum

1 Managing Software With Yum

This chapter provides an overview of Yum, and includes details about Yum configuration and the yum that you use to install and upgrade software packages on your Oracle Linux systems.

About Yum

Oracle Linux provides the yum utility which you can use to install or upgrade RPM packages. The main benefit of using yum is that it also installs or upgrades any package dependencies. yum downloads the packages from repositories such as those that are available on the Oracle Linux yum server, but you can also set up your own repositories on systems that do not have Internet access.

The Oracle Linux yum server is a convenient way to install Oracle Linux and Oracle VM packages, including bug fixes, security fixes and enhancements, rather than installing them from installation media. You can access the server at https://yum.oracle.com/.

You can also subscribe to the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM errata mailing lists to be notified when new packages are released. You can access the mailing lists at https://oss.oracle.com/mailman/listinfo/el-errata and https://oss.oracle.com/mailman/listinfo/oraclevm-errata.

About ULN

The repositories that are available on the Oracle Linux yum server are aligned with the channels that are available on the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN), with the exception of ULN channels that are limited to Oracle Linux Premier Support customers. These include channels for products such as Ksplice.

On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the regional yum servers that are made available via the service gateways are configured to also include additional repositories to provide access to content typically available to Oracle Linux Premier Support customers on ULN.

ULN is tightly integrated with yum. If you have registered your system with ULN, you can use yum commands with ULN channels to maintain the software on your system.

For more detailed information about working with ULN, including how to create and use a Yum server that acts as a local mirror of the ULN channels, see Oracle Linux: Unbreakable Linux Network User's Guide for Oracle Linux 6 and Oracle Linux 7.