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Asked: 2012-07-09 23:04:40 +0800 CST

When would yum be of use to an Ubuntu user?

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My understanding is that yum, and the rpm system, is only useful on distributions such as Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS. I thought that Ubuntu, as a Debian based system, had no use for yum.

So I was surprised to find yum in the (universe section of) the official Ubuntu repositories.

When would yum be of use to an Ubuntu user?

package-management

3 Answers

  1. Yum is for RPM packages. RPM is not the preferred installation method in Ubuntu. The equivalent to Yum would be APT and dpkg. Yum is not a preferred way to update an Ubuntu system.

    To install it, you can do so from USC, or from terminal:

    sudo apt-get install yum

    I don't think you would have a use for it, since there are equivalent Commands in Ubuntu. See the Table of Equivalent Commands

    I would think that it can be used as a backup, if for some reason normal command won't work.

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  2. The primary use case for yum in Ubuntu is if a third-party application has its own yum repository, and no apt repository. Then it will sometimes work to install yum, enable the vendor/project repository for that software, and install the software.

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  3. It is needed to create come types of LXC Containers, for example, those based on CentOS.

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