Fedora 9 Week: Package Management from the Command Line

Tuesday, May 27. 2008

Posted by Chris Tyler in Fedora 9 Week at 00:01 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

Fedora 9 Week: Package Management from the Command Line

This article is part of Fedora 9 Week.

In Fedora 9, the default package manager has changed from Yum to PackageKit. PackageKit is a system service that can queue package installation and removal requests. In Fedora 9 it works with a Yum-based backend (and can work with other backends on other systems).

To manage packages from the command line in Fedora 9, there are two options available: first, you could continue to use the yum command which is still present. The second option is to use the PackageKit command-line tool, pkcon, which works a lot like the yum command but which interfaces with the PackageKit service.

Like yum, pkcon accepts a subcommand and arguments. Here are some of the more common uses and the closest corresponding yum command:

pkcon command	yum command	description
pkcon search name pattern	yum list pattern	lists packages with names containing pattern (note: with yum it's necessary to specify wildcard astrisks if required.).
pkcon search details pattern	yum search pattern	lists packages with details (including description) containing pattern
pkcon install packageId	yum install packagename	installs the designated package
pkcon install-file filename	yum localinstall filename	installs the designated RPM file, resolving dependencies through yum repositories as required
pkcon update-system	yum update	update all packages on the system for which updates are available
pkcon update packageId	yum update packagename	update only the specified package
pkcon get description packageId	yum info packagename	get detailed information on the specified package
pkcon get depends packageId	yum deplist packagename	display dependency information for a package

Since pkcon queues requests with the PackageManager service, it does not ask for confirmation before proceeding with an installation or removal (which is the default behavior for yum). However, you do have the option of adding the -n option to the command line to enqueue a request without waiting for it to complete.

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the problem is, it's not working

** ERROR **: Could not connect to system DBUS.
aborting...
Aborted

thats all with the pkcon commands

#1 agony (Homepage) on 2008-05-28 18:17 (Reply)

Found the error, pkcon can't be run as root. Only as normal user.

maybe that should be added to the entry above

#1.1 agony (Homepage) on 2008-05-28 18:32 (Reply)

To be honest, it can't be run from console mode which give me the same error as agony. That said... PK is more of a front end to Yum than an dropin replacement for YUM.

#2 Duv on 2008-05-29 00:59 (Reply)

it does not seem to work. period .

#2.1 what? on 2008-06-05 16:35 (Reply)

Does pkcon search faster than yum search?

#3 mysurface (Homepage) on 2008-06-05 20:40 (Reply)

Good explanation of what pkcon is, but how about explaining why it's better than yum? All I got from the article was that it has the same effect but works differently.

#4 Eric Smith (Homepage) on 2008-06-18 20:45 (Reply)

"If it's not broken, don't fix it!"
I'll stick with yum.

#5 Kurt Risser on 2008-09-22 10:20 (Reply)

Hello,

is this command (Pkcon install) working in Centos 5

Thnx

#6 Rohit on 2008-11-10 08:01 (Reply)

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