[Yum] I installed YUM but can't find it!!!

[Enrique Perez-Terron]

On Wed, 2004-07-21 at 15:46, Jerry Schromm wrote:
> 
> Hey I successfully installed YUM but I can't find it
> anywhere. Am I missing something? Where is it located?
> I would appreciate you letting me know. I just got
> started with Linux. I am familiarizing fast. I am
> doing it wituout any help so it took a day or two to
> dial a lot of it in. Desensitize to it some. Ok let me
> know about where the program resides after the
> install. I looked everywhere it seems.

I wonder where you look for it... Did you expect to find an icon on the
desktop, or an entry in the panel menu system?

This is not how it works with Linux. 

Although there are browsers like Nautilus to see your files in a way
similar to the Explorer in Windows systems, in Linux you should learn to
work with a command shell (or command window, or terminal window, or...
it has many names, but Linux people mostly talk about a shell). If your
Linux distribution uses Gnome, you can click the right mouse button on
the desktop to get a menu, where you can choose "Open Terminal". If your
distribution uses KDE rather than Gnome, I believe KDE places a
"terminal" icon on the panel (panel ~ taskbar in windows).

Start typing "which yum" on the command line (without the quotes, and
hit the Enter key). If you get a pathname as a response, there you have
it, and you can ignore everything I say in this mail about your PATH. It
is OK.

You do not tell how you installed yum, or what kind of Gnu/Linux system
you have. If you installed it using rpm, almost certainly you will find
it as /usr/bin/yum. If you downloaded the source and did a "make" and
"make install" I suppose it went to /usr/local/bin/yum.

To use it, it should suffice to type "yum" as the first word on the
command line in a terminal window. If that does not work (you get "bash:
yum: command not found" or similar), you need to fix you PATH - provided
the program actually got installed somewhere reasonable.

Most Linux distributions by default install a command "locate" that you
can use to find files anywhere on your system. The "locate" system
updates its database every night, so newly installed files may not
appear until the next day. However, I have the impression that files
installed with "rpm" do show up immediately, so maybe "locate"'s
programmers have added a feature to query the "rpm" system as well. To
use "locate", you can try the command "locate '*/yum'" (without the
double quotes "" but including the single quotes '').

If you installed yum using rpm, you can get the list of files belonging
to the package "yum" with the command "rpm -ql yum".

In the Linux world people use different shells, and I do not know what
shell you are using, but "bash" is by far the most common, and the
default one with all Linux distributions I know about. So, If you are
using "bash" (to find out, try the command "echo $0", I believe that
works with all shells. "ls -l /proc/$$/exe" should also work with all
shells that I know about), then you fix your path by editing the file
~/.bashrc.

Beware, you might think you do not have any such file, because it does
not show up in listings. Files with names that begin with a dot are
conventionally not listed, they are considered "hidden". However, if you
list the files in your home directory with the command "ls -a" you will
see all the hidden files. In any case, if the file does not exist, you
should create it, so just start your editor and specify the file name
~/.bashrc, and see what happens.

The leading ~/ denotes you home directory.

Before fiddling with ~/.bashrc, just type "echo $PATH" to see what you
path is. It should include the following directories:
   /home/<your_username>/bin (if this directory exists - it does not
                              harm anyway)
   /usr/local/bin
   /usr/bin
   /bin

User root should also have 

   /usr/sbin
   /sbin

In ~/.bashrc, add or modify a line that begins "PATH=" or "export
PATH=". After the equal sign there should be a list of directories
separated with colons (:). Make sure /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin both
appear in the list. There must not be any spaces in the list or around
the '=' sign.

Either of the following arrangements in your ~/.bashrc should work:

  PATH=/home/<your_username>/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
  export PATH

or

  export PATH=/home/<your_username>/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

If there are two lines, they can appear in any order. There may be other
names other than PATH as well on the line with "export".

Once you have edited ~/.bashrc, the changes only take effect for shells
started after the changes were saved on disk. Shells that started before
that can update their PATHs by re-executing the file ~/.bashrc, as with
the command "source ~/.bashrc". Do not omit the ~/ part even if your
current working directory is your home directory.

A final remark: When asking a group for help you should try to provide
more information about what you did and did not, and what happened. How
do you know the install was successful? Tell what you see on the screen.
Of course, when you are really new to Linux, it is hard to even know
what information to provide, but after this mail you are a step further.
You should have told what kind of linux you have installed, what tools
you used to install yum, what version of yum you installed (or where you
got it from), what tools you used to look for the results of the
install, and what responses the tools gave.

But of course, you are welcome to ask further questions.

Regards,
Enrique