By default, when the user installs software through the RPM Package Manager or through YUM, usually, the software’s configuration files included in the RPM do not replace the existing configuration files on the filesystem, but, if they differ from those that currently exist, they are saved with the rpmnew extension. In case the rpm is [...]

It’s been a long time since the last time I checked the available software for managing long running processes. Software in this particular area has evolved and, after some research and testing on a virtual machine, I tried to install supervisord in a CentOS 5.6 box. Unfortunately, no RPM package exists for the latest 3.X [...]

Red Hat used to release its kernel SRPM package including a tarball of the vanilla kernel sources and a set of custom patches. This made it possible to rebuild the kernel with or without patches or with a custom selection of patches. It seems that things have changed and Red Hat now releases the Red [...]

About three years ago I had posted a general guide on how to create RPM packages. According to that guide the RPM building environment was prepared using the handy utility rpmdev-setuptree (part of the rpmdevtools package in Fedora). This post describes the manual preparation of the RPM building environment.

When it comes to software for your CentOS installation, there is no such thing as a good yum configuration, but a configuration that can bring you the software you need, while, at the same time, causing the least possible trouble regarding core package upgrades. This small article goes into the details of configuring YUM using [...]

Having spent some days with CentOS on my desktop and having tried several 3rd party RPM repositories, I’ve finally decided to mix the official repos (base, updates, addons, extras) with RPMforge and also make use of the priorities yum plugin. Read on if you care about the details…

RPM and DEB packages are both containers for other files. An RPM is some sort of cpio archive. On the other hand, a DEB file is a pure ar archive. So, it should be possible to unpack their contents using standard archiving tools, regardless of your distribution’s package format. Under normal conditions, you should use [...]

I started packaging linux software for my Fedora machines from the time I was using Fedora Rawhide (development version) as my primary system. There is no repository that is synced with Rawhide, so there was a huge amount of software I had to compile (mostly multimedia related). This is a very time-consuming task, so I [...]

These are some general guidelines and notes in order to assist the adventurous first-time Fedora user to get started with RPM package building on Fedora Core.