I’ve been using Fedora (Core and all) on and off for a few years now and its parsimonious attitudes to codecs notwithstanding, the thing that always reduces me to a whimpering, pleading wreck is watching Yum installing a piece of software. I can forgive its tendency to handhold and even to confabulate, but Yum moves with all the speed of a treacle flow at the North Pole. Apt-get has already done its stuff and gone home for tea but Yum is still setting the table and polishing the silver. Once you’ve used Yum for a while you will know why it puts the V in verbose. Is there anyway to get this package manager off the sofa and into the gym for some serious exercise?

It’s not the hardware

Once you’ve used Yum for a while you will know why it puts the V in verbose

“Bet you’re running Fedora on a computer that was being used when the Dinosaurs roamed the Earth, mate?”, you say; well, yes and no. My ancient machine with a hobbled 400MHZ Celeron processor ran Fedora Core 5 (just) so you might have a point, but I did not notice any huge improvement in speed when I installed later versions of Fedora on more powerful desktops and laptops with processors in the 2.6MHZ range. I fell for the advertising hype every time. Yum, they said, is faster than ever. Go on, Install Fedora and see it run! I did. I didn’t get a rampaging Tiger; I got a beached Whale. Hardware bottleneck? I don’t think so. After all, I had been using distros with Apt-get for years on a variety of machine speeds, and it always did what it said on the tin, but Yum seemed to breach the Trades Descriptions Act. Judged on speed alone I have yet to see anything that can match Apt-get. So, what can we do to make Yum a contender instead of riding a one way ticket to Polookaville?

Don’t use a GUI for Yum?

I am always looking for front ends to command line tools, especially package managers. You sacrifice granularity and potential problem solving to be sure, but you gain ease of use and relative transparency — and with front ends like Synaptic you are not disappointed. There is little by way of a speed hit. As it should be. Yum is a different matter. Install and fire up Kyum or Yumex and you have two very fine-looking and featureful GUIs for Yum but both have reduced me to a state of catatonic paralysis by their plodding slowness—especially Yumex. I know checking transactions and keys are important but these front ends seem to slow even this. Even Packagekit, the new frontend for Yum since Fedora 9, is no Olympic sprint champion either. Yes, if you use Yum on the command line you will need to memorize some stuff, but believe me, after you have almost lost the will to live watching Kyum, and particularly Yumex, grind out a simple install, you will think committing some commands to memory a small price to pay to avoid install rage.

Take the waiting out of wanting

added together these tips should help Yum put a foot on the accelerator pedal

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