I only just instaleld fedora core 6 roday. This is alittle older version so there are quite a few package updates waiting. When I run package update, however I get the above message. The same happens with add/remove. What can I do?

Hello neolithic_psyche,

It's the background service yum-updatesd running. It's the service that notifies you when updates are ready and places that little icon on the panel bar. I was irritated by that message, too. I like to manually update every day or so and don't need to be notified.

You can wait a while until it finishes and notifies you of updates. Or, you can disable it if you want...

System > Administration > Services > [root password] > Uncheck yum-updatesd > Save Changes & Exit.

That's what I did. I like it better this way.

Perhaps an update command is running in the background? Perhaps the last update command quit uncleanly? In the latter case, I recommend removing the lockfile.