[Yum] newbie

[Steve Ingraham]

> Garrick Staples wrote:
> >> I am new to Linux and yum.  I am attempting to install yum on a
> RedHat
> >> as 3 machine.  I have downloaded yum 2.6.1 from the
> >> http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/ website.  I have also extracted
> the
> >> files currently in /home/yum/.  I cannot seem to properly install
yum
> on
> >> this system.  Can someone give me some direction on what steps I
need
> to
> >> perform to install yum 2.6.1 onto my computer?
> 
> >As per http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/download.ptml, you'll see
> that
> >the python versions on RHEL3 limits yum to 2.0.8.
> 
> Ok, forgive my ignorance as a newbie but I don't really know what that
> means in my situation.  Have I attempted to download and install an
> incompatible version?  If so what should I be installing?  As stated
> before, I am a newbie and seem to be making newbie mistakes but don't
> know I am doing so.  If I am incorrectly attempting something I should
> not be attempting what exactly am I needing to do instead?

>RHEL3 is a slightly older distro, that means some of its software is a
>bit out of date.  One of those packages is python.  If you run 'rpm -q
>python', you'll see that you have python-2.2.  

>Reading the yum download page, you can see that yum-2.6 requires
>python-2.4.  The last version of yum that supports python-2.2 is
>yum-2.0, so you need to download from the yum-2.0.x link.


>But we might want to back up and ask, "Why do you want yum?"  RHEL
isn't
>a free distro and doesn't have any yum repositories.

Why?  Well, I have inherited this system.  The previous administrator
had a subscription to up2date that has expired.  I have been informed
that yum can update our server in place of up2date so I am attempting to
download it in order to update the server.  Are you telling me yum will
not work for this purpose?  Am I not going to be able to utilize yum for
updates to redhat?

Steve