Gentoo on the PS3 - Full Install Instructions 239
An anonymous reader writes "My friend Jake just bought a PS3, and he wanted to install Linux on it. Since he didn't know much about Linux, it was my responsibility to help him with it. His requirements — Install a distribution which is easy to maintain and run. He wanted to make the full use of his Linux install, so he needed a distro which wouldn't hold him back with frustrating problems. The only solution was using a distro which had a better package management system, and did its work without bothering you, the end user. Having used Gentoo extensively, I knew that this would be the solution to my problems. What follows is full install instructions, plus personal opinions, on why Gentoo is better than Fedora Core or YDL on the PS3"
How much did Gentoo get for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How much did Gentoo get for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary was clearly written by a Gentoo fanboy, as the "requirements" he lists are fairly common, and it's definitely arguable that Gentoo would be the best (or even in the top 5) distro to solve the particular issues he brings up. His friend asked for a distro recommendation, so he (surprise!) recommends the distro he's used "extensively" and then proceeds to slam the other major distros. Flame. Bait.
Re:How much did Gentoo get for this? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Overkill (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Overkill....not (Score:3, Insightful)
1. do everything by "hand" - this way you learn a bit more about the OS "bricks" and you stop calling everything "linux", just the kernel...
2. Best documentation around
3. Best documentation around
sure it takes sometimes to g
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1. Not having to do everything by hand.
2. Not having to read the documentation for most apps.
3. Not having to read the documentation for most apps.
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There really is no reason to complain about having options. If you don't like having options, get a mac and get off slashdot.
Re:Overkill (Score:5, Insightful)
The hard part of Gentoo is setting it up and that's really by choice. I've set it up from both stage 1 and 3 and trust me, there is a huge difference. However, once Gentoo is set up, it's cake to maintain. I'd go as far to say that it is the easiest distro I've ever used when it comes to installing software if it is set up correctly. As long as it is set to sync the portage tree regularly (via Cron) and GUI tools such as Porthole or Kuroo, maintenance is a breeze. May I suggest checking out a Gentoo based OS like Sabayon or Vida.
*Disclaimer: This message typed on a Sabayon powered system.
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A cake with config frosting that must be, on occasion, manually blended with incompatible new frosting.
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Yoda, is that you?
Seriously, I assume the installer will config the system. Once the use flags are set up, that's pretty much it. While some config files will change as software is updated, not updating the configs has never been a problem for me. Updating them can cause issues, but so far, the original configs have always worked.
If the use flags are set up conservatively, this will rarely be a probl
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And the unfriendliness comes mainly in forcing you to edit config files. When I was using Gentoo, I let the system go for a few months (didn't have an Internet connection) and tried updating (just the security updates, mind)...over two hundred config files needed updating, some of which were required to continue the upgrade process. X was broken, and I didn't have the time to spend fixing everything.
Gentoo ha
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One of the options is to use app-portage/cfg-update
http://people.zeelandnet.nl/xentric/ [zeelandnet.nl]
Easy to use GUI & CLI alternative for etc-update with safe automatic updating functionality
I use it regularly. I only have to manually update files which I myself have edited (at least once).
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I don't know why people say you can't start with Gentoo. I think it is the place to start.
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I'm not arguing that Gentoo is easy, but if the person is brand new to Linux he's going to have lot's of questions and need a lot of help regardless of distro. If this person is also a very technically saavy person, Gentoo seems as good a distro as any, because of the great help one can g
Games? This is a PS3, for cricket's sake (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to play a game on your WORKSTATION 3 running Gentoo OS, you push a button, and it becomes a PLAYSTATION 3 ready for inserting a game disc.
What? (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyway, the PS3 is absolutely the last machine you should ever, ever need Gentoo on. Every single PS3 is exactly the same. There is no need to "optimise" a build for a PS3 simply because the build should be optimal anyway, assuming you pick a dist which targets the PS3 exclusively. It's not like x86 where you have a gazillion different processors and devices that you might get some measurable gain by tweaking a build switch or two.
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Had you read the article you would have known that:
Other PS3 compatible distros (yellow dog, fedora) are compiled for a generic PPC not specifically for the PS3
He wasn't compiling gentoo from source, he was installing precompiled packages from a repository of packages which were build specifically for the PS3.
For any package which has not been built by someone else for PS3 yet, he has the opportunity to easily compile it, as opposed to having to do without it or perform
Wow (Score:2)
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Why on earth would someone who doesn't know much about Linux want to install in on a PS3, of all things.
That's a nice experiment for geeks, and I'm sure there's potential, but it's not partiularly useful for someone who doesn't know much about Linux.
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Linux on a PS3 is pointless for someone who wouldn't use it on the desktop.
Moreover, every single modern Linux distribution allows you to easily select a dual boot option when you install.
That might be awesome (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That might be awesome (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That might be awesome (Score:5, Funny)
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There are plenty of reasonably quiet miniITX rigs about. I'm sure they're not completely silent, but I'd bet that they're quiet enough. And, in the meantime, they'll be smaller and upgradeable.
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Why not a PC (Score:2)
Re:Why not a PC (Score:4, Funny)
YES
Because you can!
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questions (Score:5, Insightful)
Since he didn't know much about Linux, it was my responsibility to help him with it.
* if he doesn't know the first thing about Linux, what does he need it for? on a PS3 of all things
he wants to learn the ropes you say? OK
* why doesn't he install it on his own? no better way to do it and the interwebs are full of documentation
this is not meant to be flamy in any way. I was just wondering how come everyone wants penguin power these days, but at the same time they are not willing to invest time/sweat in it.
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Well, that's obvious. To pick up chicks.
The only thing that impresses the ladies more than a really expensive game console is a really expensive pimped out game console with a picture of a penguin on it.
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Because most people just want a system that works.
is that why 90% of people run Windows? *innocentsmile*
They have better thing to do in life than to learn the core of a new operating system.
to each his own. I have no say in what anyone can do with their time (though, acquiring knowledge is pretty hard to beat). installing an operating system is nowhere close of "learning its core". stop exaggerating.
Because of people like you, Linux will never go mainstream.
I wasn't aware that "Linux" is a company t
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Who gives a shit? (Score:2, Troll)
*If* I buy a PS3, it will be so I can play cool games and watch Hi-Def (blu-ray) movies, not so I can load Linux and surf the web on a 65" screen.
Just because you *can* doesn't mean you *should*.
define friend ? (Score:3, Funny)
friend2: -Gentoo, then! (mouahahaha! Done with this sucker, no, let's get it worse, let's troll slashdot with it!!! Should I put his email online too?)
Article writer without a clue (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, theoretically. Practically, you don't see or feel the difference. Citing this as #1 reason to use gentoo is stupid.
2. Modular distro, so you have full control over the installation.
Oh yeah, because the other distros dictate which software you have to install
3. It teaches you more about Linux.
Yes, because watching compiler output scrolling by for 8 hours gives me super linux skillz!
4. You can update it whenever you want, don't have t
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Some apps however, seriously benefit from being compiled for a specific CPU...
Since you mention sparc, the earlier sparc (v7) chips had no (i believe) long division instructions in their FPUs. Thus, code compiled for the most generic sparc chips will use other instructions to emulate a long divide. Calculations like this are common in encryption.
Later sparcs (v8, v9/ultr
Re:Article writer without a clue (Score:5, Insightful)
But as usual, you miss the most important point. USE flags [gentoo.org].
Why compile Samba with ldap support if you're never going to use LDAP in your network. In fact, isn't it nice to specify to the whole install that nothing should be built with LDAP support? I think so. Less code compiled in = small binaries, less code, less chance of a crash/security update.
I couldn't care less about the speed of Gentoo. I don't change my CFLAGs at all. But I like being able to tailor my machine to the purpose of the system.
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For example, my previous computer had a Voodoo 3, which requires the glide libraries to get accelerated 3d on linux. Gentoo is the only modern distro I know of that lets me use glide, and it is trivial to enable it. It is p
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I can see only a very small benefit to custom compiling all (or even most of) your packages, except in very specific cases, and binary size is probably of secondary concern in the era of almost free 80GB drives.
I'm glad Gentoo exists as a solution for the people who want it, but some people pitch it as the end-all be-all solution of linux machines, and that's just not how it goes. With the proper administrator, even Fed
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So what? I can see only a very small drawback to it, assuming you have a sufficiently fast machine and a sufficiently fast network connection. I think it IS pretty stupid on the PS3 unless you happen to have another gentoo system around (or I guess any linux) so you can use a cross-compiling dist
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I'm glad Gentoo exists as a solution for the people who want it, but some people pitch it as the end-all be-all solution of linux machines, and that's just not how it goes. With the proper administrator, even Fedora will run well on a server.
...of course, I'm biased. I've used Slackware for 10 years or so and that will make ANYONE a curmudgeon.
Exactly. Gentoo is a solution for people to use how they see fit. No more... no less. It isn't the solution for everyone, nor do we try to be. Instead, we try to be a solution for as many people as possible, and give the user the tools necessary to tailor the distribution to suit their needs if it doesn't already.
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Also, to enable LDAP support in samba you need various ldap libraries installed, wasting even more space and providing new places for security holes to be found.
Here's another example, i tried to install pine on a redhat box fairly recently... Pine has optional support for kerberos, which on redhat is turned on, so i had to install a whole stack of
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Even so, it's not like the system is going to take a big performance hit because some packages have added support to them (except maybe disk space, depending on the package dependencies). And there's the added bonus of already having built-in support without having to redo the package if you need/want support for a feature
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Gentoo can be very good for putting together a disk image with a very specific set of software, and no extra baggage. Having control over compile time settings gives you a lot more flexibility compared with RPM packages.
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On that note, having my friend install Gentoo for me would have been as educational as having my friend take a test for me, and tell me what grade "I" got, and don't bother me with all the confusing stuff like what the answers were, yet alone the questions.
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Someone tells them gentoo is good, they try installing it, give up quickly and never look back.
If you let them try it first, and they grow to like it, then they will have much greater incentive to complete the process when faced with the task of installing it. Also, they will know how it *should* work, so they will be more easily be able to tell if they botched the install.
I've installed gentoo for a few people, most of them have since tried to install gentoo on other system
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Exactly. Try and install ONLY the software you WANT on a RedHat system for example: impossible because of dependencies. And I am not speaking of libraries here. Try and install without X, LDAP (add favourite useless app here) for instance.
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In certain cases there actually is some truth to that, but unfortunately some Gentoo users horribly exaggerate it. There's a good summary [gentoo.org] on the Gentoo Forums.
He worded this badly, but to a ce
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Explaining a graphical process through screenshots and/or animation is a pain, often difficult and time consuming to follow.
Explaining a command line process is much easier, less prone to error (cut+paste) and faster to follow (cut+paste) and any errors returned will also be in textual form so they can be reported and queried.
You don't need to know how or why the commands you paste work, just follow the guide and paste them in. Why does anyone have a
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1. Theoretically, faster than any other distro.
Yes, theoretically. Practically, you don't see or feel the difference. Citing this as #1 reason to use gentoo is stupid.
Actually, it really depends on the software/hardware combination. For example, using Gentoo on an Opteron box doesn't show much variation, since the baseline is a CPU with AMD64/EM64T extensions already. The difference in PPC, however, can be pretty astonishing. At the same time, the PS3 is PPC64, so this whole point is moot here since the distribution is already optimized pretty closely to the capabilities as a baseline. About the only thing we offer over most other 64-bit PPC systems is Altivec for
PS3-CBE Protoyping-Porting? (Score:5, Interesting)
A good strategy is to start developing on a PS3, while CBE HW catches up. If development takes 6-9 months, by then the CBEs will be cheaper, more stable, better understood by both their vendors and the community for getting support and working around weak links. And that time can be used to fundraise and team recruit around a PS3 prototype.
But the $64,000 Question (literally) is what it takes to port a PS3 Linux app to CBE Linux. Does anyone know yet? Whitepaper? Walking/talking expert for hire/bribe? If porting a PS3/Linux app to CBE/Linux is harder than porting an embedded x86 app to a Xeon, or an embedded R6000 to a multiproc R6000 server, then it might be worth it just to wait to start on the CBEs when they're ready. Though a PS3 running a supercomputer DSP app prototype could be cool enough to be worth the whole trouble, anyway.
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The memory difference is the biggest hurdle since it will limit your data sets. However it will allow developers to prototype. The code itself will be completely portable between bo
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Does the PS3 API to the SPUs automatically (at compile time, or runtime) scale to the number of SPUs available? And is switching networking from PS3 to CBE infiniband completely modular?
In other words, can the same code run faster against more data if coded to scale to resources, without the equivalent of lots of #IFDEF parallel code paths?
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The question is what's the effort/cost in porting PS3 to CBE? Is the savings of prototyping on PS3 worth the expense of porting to CBE, if they're that different? Considering the differential gradient of CBE cost by the time the PS3 prototype is ready to port.
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meh (Score:2)
yes I have da ppc chip running linux. I prefer Fedora.
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Do you trust this man? (Score:3, Interesting)
while they're not bad in any sense, they do have problems which are associated with any RPM based distro- dependency hell. I'm sure that any of you who've tried to install any applications would have faced the problem of missing dependencies sometime. And it's all too common to have a few packages totally missing from the repository which means that you have to search for their respective RPMs on the net, download them and install them separately. While functional, this can get a little frustrating over time.
"Dependency hell" existed before YUM (which came from Yellowdog's Seth K. Vidal) solved the problem. YUM [duke.edu] is explicitly a dependency solver. It builds on top of the RPM system to automatically find and install the dependent RPM packages.
I knew it wasn't going to be Fedora Core or Yellow Dog since they seemed to have lots of problems when it came to media players.
Fedora Core (don't know about Yellow Dog) explicitly chooses to stay away from software which relies upon non-Free, patent-encumbered material. As a project it considers things like Ubuntu's binary graphics driver distribution, or the inclusion of mp3 decoding software (which is encumbered by the Frauenhoefer Institute's ridiculous patent) to be against the GPL and Free Software. As a result it helps to foster the development of free alternatives, without which there would be a much smaller software ecosystem. This is sane, long-term thinking which steps away from opportunistic, short-term compromises which seek to cannibalize market-share from other Linux distros by spreading confusion and misinformation. Debian has a very similar attitude. There are some non-Fedora run repositories where people have packaged up things like the mplayer codec bundle, mpg321, flash etc. If you really have to have them it's easy to edit /etc/yum/repos.d to add the repository.
The only solution was using a distro which had a better package management system, and did its work without bothering you, the end user.
Look, if an ebuild isn't in the portage tree then you're not going to have much luck installing it unless you make your own. Ditto for an rpm being available to yum in a repository. Your article is uninformed fanboi-ism. To your friend: don't let him near your PS3!
To anyone not using Gentoo, don't take this article as representative of the community, it's a great distro with many advantages and not everyone involved with it is as much as a moron as the article writer.
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Fanboy-ism at its best/worst (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using GNU/Linux since about 1998, and I used Gentoo for approximately 3+ years. I've even written and submitted an ebuild or two. It definitely has some advantages over other distros and definitely has disadvantages. But it (like all man-made things) is far from perfect. Statements like these simply aren't true:
In Gentoo packages are installed using scripts called ebuilds which are intended to contain all of the dependency information for the packages. People write the ebuilds. People (all of them) occasionally make mistakes. Its not unheard of to have a dependency bug in Gentoo.
The ease of installation also depends on the quality of the ebuild. Were all possible combos of USE flags even tested for a particular ebuild? Do those combinations actually work? Again, ebuild aren't magic and they contain to contain errors. Also, portage only gives you a default configuration file. You have to make (and test) any configuration file changes yourself. So the statement that portage will "setup everything" is misleading.
This definitely isn't always true. As the Gentoo devs struggled to get a handle on quality, packages began to take a substantial amount of time to work their way into the stable arches. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but at one point new ebuilds had to sit in ~arch status (sort of like test repository in other distros) for one month without complaint before being marked as stable. It didn't seem to matter if anyone actually tested or even looked at the ~arch ebuild during that month. It was just a mandatory waiting period in which the dev hoped that some users bothered to test the ebuild and complain if it broke. I think the quality of the ebuilds are improving with the refinement of Gentoo's architecture herds, but with more process and more people comes delays. Quality and speed are almost always at odds in development.
Performing work always takes time, even installing binary packages, and the default behavior of Portage is to install from source.
As an experiment, I'd like to see everyone interested in Linux on PS3 to log onto IRC and ask somebody to install Gentoo for them remotely. Report back here with the results. ;)
Basically Gentoo can be great if it fits your needs, but pretending that Gentoo is perfect and problem free isn't going to change the reality that it isn't.
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
MOD PARENT UP
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That's totally on purpose! You don't want any package manager to mess with your config. When was the last time SuSE overwrote the httpd.conf with a default version? Okay, with major releases it is a bit tedious to upgrade to a new config file format. But any ebuild is free to provide an automatically updated config file for you, which you can accept, merge or reject with etc-up
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Well, my understanding is that a new ebuild has to sit in ~arch for a
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This is true; however whereas binary package distributions tend to work-or-not-work, Gentoo provides you with pretty much everything you need to fix something when it doesn't. It's less a matter of "perfect" and more a matter of "perfectly transparent".
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There is nothing preventing you from rolling your own RPM or DEB. At some level, distro wars become silly and meaningless; in the end you're running pretty much the same applications and underlying operating system.
head asplode (Score:3, Insightful)
My brain exploded when I read that. This author is WAY out of touch with reality. Of all the widely-used Linux distros, Gentoo, by FAR, requires the most administration effort and expertise.
Gentoo is for people who want the very latest in technology and the highest possible customization ability, but don't mind manually rewriting config files every week when a new version of a given package is released. Clearly, the author of this article is not qualified to--actually, no, he's just on crack.
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Actually, no. Gentoo is not the easiest to install, even with the new GTK graphical installer. But to maintain, it is a breeze. "emerge --update" isn't any harder to type than "apt-get update". And yes, there are graphical frontends to portage.
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But I still prefer portage and emerge over apt-get (except for the compiling time). It just seemed easier to do things that are complicated in Debian, like downgrading a bunch of packages, or trying out different verions of a package. And I was a noob when I used Gentoo.
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With Gentoo, they release packages the second they are ready, instead of waiting for OS releases. You could end up doing config work every week with Gentoo that you only need to do twice a year wi
Just play games on the thing! (Score:4)
On a side note, has anyone managed to screw their PS3 by installing Linux yet - is it possible the combination of shiny new toy and no real Linux knowledge could lead to expensive shiny looking bricks?
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There's NOTHING wrong with having a device that does more than one thing.
With "friends" like this... (Score:5, Funny)
His requirements -- Install a distribution which is easy to maintain and run.
So you installed Gentoo. You bastard. Did you run over his dog at the same time?
Distro wars (Score:2)
In this dream a light wells up behind the guru. He gestures to the earth, t
Office Suite? (Score:2, Funny)
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Problem from the beginning (Score:2)
I totally don't know what that means, but I want it!
To prove we aren't all fanboys (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair, I don't know what Gentoo's install is like now. Maybe you can do an install without knowing much.
Fanboy? What's the point? (Score:2, Interesting)
My second favorate distribution is knoppix.
I use knoppix when there is a problem for the s
We are all impressed with the conclusion. (Score:2)
So the only solution was to have him install the distro you were most familiar with. I have heard of this happening before. Somewhere...
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Yum makes Windows Updates look stable, reliable and fast. I never want to see that buggy steaming pile again...
APT is better, almost tolerable, but you still have issues with it occasionally, at least I did.
Gentoo's system does the same thing, but I found the granularity of control is better documented. This means that I can use it in the same fashion as I'd use Yum or APT - namely tell it what I want, and it'll do the work, but additionally, I can more easily perform simple tweaks to fix problem pack
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apt-cache search
yum search
To search package names and metadata?
I like and use both FreeBSD and Gentoo, but there's no need to disparage the great work done by other distros to justify your choices.
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man yum
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