Newbie with Fedora

[Geeth]

Hi people,

I have been playing with linux for a little bit but have just starting trying to get into it more now.

I have started using Fedora 8 but when use the yum command I quite often get

Another app is currently holding the yum lock; waiting for it to exit...

But I don't know what is hold the yum lock. Can someone please help me with unlocking yum. I have checked the help and couldn't find anything there on unlocking it or finding out when is holding it locked.

[Nabaachy]

Hi,
it might be because the yum-update or another process of yum is running in the background. i get this error very often. i just kill that process to use it again. you can do this by executing this as root from the terminal

# top
this command will show all the process running. on the right side you will find yum process name and on the left there will be the PID number. something like 1134 when you get the pid number of the yum process hit ctr+c.

if you cant get a hold of it from there execute

#pgrep yum
this will show the pid number of yum if it is running. then kill the process.

# kill PID
in the PID enter the pid number of yum.

hopefully now you will be able to use yum to install apps.

hope this helps.
Nabaachy

[i92guboj]

Hi,
it might be because the yum-update or another process of yum is running in the background. i get this error very often. i just kill that process to use it again. you can do this by executing this as root from the terminal

I don't use fedora. But if yum is running automatically, then maybe it's for a good reason. I would check the fedora documentation and see if there's a way to turn off automatic updates (of whatever yum is doing in the background).

This could also happen, I guess, if you start two instances of yum at the same time (for example, to install two packages concurrently. I guess the yum rpm database is locked to prevent problems that can arise on these situations.

[Nabaachy]

In my experience this happens because the updates are not applied, often after a fresh install there will be 200+ updates which takes sometime to load.. especially after a reboot it will take some time to settle down yum too, because the updates are refreshed very time. I have never encountered any problems related to killing the process of yum manually, so far.

[i92guboj]

In my experience this happens because the updates are not applied, often after a fresh install there will be 200+ updates which takes sometime to load.. especially after a reboot it will take some time to settle down yum too, because the updates are refreshed very time. I have never encountered any problems related to killing the process of yum manually, so far.

I see. Well, as long as it's just that, then it doesn't matter. I was thinking in things like "don't kill it while it's installing a core piece of your system" and so on.

If it's just some kind of notifier what in your memory, then it should not be a problem to kill it. But if it's updating on the background, it can silently break your system progressively, until it hits a core piece.

[Dies]

system-config-services

Then turn off yum-updatesd.

While you're there turn off anything and everything you don't need.

Services in Fedora 8

Sorry, make sure you click on Edit then select All Runlevels. Turning off unnecessary services is not only good for speed but also security, and it's one of the first things you should do on Fedora.

Also have a good look through mjmwired's site since there is a great install guide to get everything else working.

[i92guboj]

That's what I meant, a much saner way to do the things

According to the man page that google found for me, that's just a notifier daemon, so, killing it it's still relatively safe, though still an ugly solution. The more correct way is to turn off the service.

I am not familiar with fedora, but I suppose that if you do so, then the user is the one that will have to periodically check for updates and the like. Just a thing to consider when disabling it.

[Geeth]

Thanks for the help.

It looks like it was the Auto-updater. ^_^