Yum yum yum

I love yum. I really do. It makes life so easy.

In the windows world, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to install software. Sometimes you need "activation keys", sometimes you need drivers that you need to go find. And always you need licenses to run the software, and woe betide you if you use it on more computers than you've licensed. And so it goes on.

Today, I needed a teminal program to run on a computer that didn't have one. So I did "yum install minicom" and a few minutes later, minicom was up and running. It's free software, so no license needed. Pretty much all software is free on linux.


I like to draw bandwidth use graphs, but I'm not going to do it with graph paper and coloured pencils. I use a program called "GD" to do it. I started using it so long ago, I can't remember what GD stands for. And it's archaic, but if I changed to use something else, I'd have to rewrite all my programs that rely on it.

So I needed to install GD on another computer. Um ...  yum to the rescue! yum install 'perl(GD)' and a few minutes later, there it was. And another program uses telnet from inside perl, so I needed Net::Telnet. yum install 'perl(Net::Telnet) - you get the idea.