Finding RPMs

The following information is to help people find their way around Fedora, specifically to do with finding RPMs. The following subtopics are available:

• Main Fedora RPM Repositories
• JPackage Java RPMs
• Notable Third Party RPM Repositories
• Layout of Main Fedora Repositories

Main Fedora RPM Repositories

The main Fedora RPM repositories are:

• Fedora Core 3 Updates (/pkgs/master/rpms/fc3/updates/ on DICE)
• Fedora Core 3 (/pkgs/master/rpms/fc3/base/ on DICE)
• Fedora Extras for Fedora Core 3 (/pkgs/master/rpms/fc3/extras/ on DICE)

These are all in the default search path for updaterpms. To add packages from any of these locations to DICE you simply need to add them to the rpms lists.

Note that most RPMs from Fedora Extras are not by default installed on DICE machines, they need to be explicitly added.

JPackage Java RPMs

While Fedora try and work out how to integrate Java into Fedora Core properly (it was removed for FC3 and is going back in in JPackage form in FC4) DICE is using its own local copy of the JPackage RPM repository.

• JPackage (/pkgs/master/rpms/jpackage/ on DICE)

Notable Third Party RPM Repositories

There are then the usual third party locations to look in, the simplest way to search these is to use Fedora Tracker. Other significant repositories worth mentioning are:

• RPMForge - This is a superset of the following:
  • FreshRPMS
  • PlanetCCRMA
  • Dries
  • DAG
  • ATrpms

These are not in the default search path for updaterpms. RPMs from these (or other) locations need to be rebuilt on DICE and submitted into the local RPM repositories.

Layout of Main Fedora Repositories

The layout of the Fedora directories on the mirror servers is probably also worth comment:

• core/ (Root of mirror, e.g. UCS Fedora Mirror)
  • core/3/ (Official FC3 release)
  • core/test/ (Test releases of upcoming Fedora releases - i.e. 3.9.something will pop up in here next week)
  • core/updates/ (updates to official releases)
    • core/updates/3/ (updates to FC3)
    • core/updates/testing/ (Updates that need further testing before release)
    • core/updates/testing/3/ (Updates in testing for FC3)
  • core/development/ (Development version of FC - aka Rawhide, this is not on linux.ed)
• extras/ (Root of extras tree, e.g. MirrorService.org Extras Mirror)
  • extras/3/ (Official FC3 extras)
  • extras/testing/ (Extras that need further testing before release)
    • extras/testing/3/ (Extras in testing for FC3)
  • extras/development/ (Extras in development - probably for rawhide)

-- AlastairScobie - 18 Feb 2005

Fleshed it out a bit and reformatted.

-- CarwynEdwards - 23 Feb 2005