Installing yum on CentOS 5.3

April 30, 2009 by thilo

We recently deployed an app on a VM with CentOS 5.3. To our delight, the packet manager yum wasn’t pre-installed. We spent some time to get it running. The Howto on http://eric.lubow.org/2008/misc/adding-yum-to-centos-5/ was a great help, but it was for CentOS 5.2. So this is an update to Eric’s blogpost.

You need to have rpm and wget already installed. Create a temporary directory, paste the following code in a file in that directory, make it executable and run it:

mkdir temp && cd temp vim yumdownload

#!/bin/bash for file in \ elfutils-0.137-3.el5.i386.rpm \ elfutils-libs-0.137-3.el5.i386.rpm \ elfutils-libelf-0.137-3.el5.i386.rpm \ expat-1.95.8-8.2.1.i386.rpm \ gmp-4.1.4-10.el5.i386.rpm \ libxml2-2.6.26-2.1.2.7.i386.rpm \ libxml2-python-2.6.26-2.1.2.7.i386.rpm \ m2crypto-0.16-6.el5.3.i386.rpm \ python-2.4.3-24.el5.i386.rpm \ python-elementtree-1.2.6-5.i386.rpm \ python-iniparse-0.2.3-4.el5.noarch.rpm \ python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm \ python-urlgrabber-3.1.0-5.el5.noarch.rpm \ readline-5.1-1.1.i386.rpm \ rpm-4.4.2.3-9.el5.i386.rpm \ rpm-libs-4.4.2.3-9.el5.i386.rpm \ rpm-python-4.4.2.3-9.el5.i386.rpm \ sqlite-3.3.6-2.i386.rpm \ yum-3.2.19-18.el5.centos.noarch.rpm \ yum-fastestmirror-1.1.16-13.el5.centos.noarch.rpm \ yum-metadata-parser-1.1.2-2.el5.i386.rpm do wget http://mirror.centos.org/centos-5/5.3/os/i386/CentOS/$file; done

chmod a+x yumdownload ./yumdownload This will get you all rpms you might need before be able to install yum.

Now try installing them all by typing: rpm -Uvh *.rpm This might not work, at least not for us. So try to install yum directly with rpm -Uvh yum-3.2.19-18.el5.centos.noarch.rpm and let the errors guide you. When you run into a circular dependencies, install the rpm by ignoring the dependencies. eg. rpm -Uvh --nodeps yum-fastestmirror*

This should finally allow you to install yum. Good Luck. ;)

This entry was posted on April 30, 2009 by thilo.