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I recently came across a program, called YUM (Yellow dog Updater, Modified) Extender, which has significantly simplified software management on the Fedora Core 3 machines I maintain.
Yumex, as its also known, adds a handy graphical interface to YUM, which itself works with the RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) application that handles software management chores on Fedora and several other Linux distributions.
YUM automates package dependency resolution and is a very capable application. However, as a command-line program, YUM takes some time to master.
Yumex is currently at its 0.23 release. It sports a fairly basic interface , but, even so, it offers the best method Ive seen yet for juggling numerous YUM software repositories.
Along with the official package sources for Fedora Core 3—currently the only distribution that Yumex supports—there are various third-party repositories for obtaining the packages that Fedora does not ship with by default. I could create profiles in Yumex to separate, for instance, fetching important core project updates from seeking out third-party packages.
Yumex is written by Tim Lauridsen and is available for free download at linux.rasmil.dk/mambo. If you run Fedora Core 3, its definitely worth a look.
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