About yum
 

Hi i'm new here and very new to linux so be gentle with me,
I have just installed Fedora core 3 to my laptop everything appears to be working ok I did a yum update and downloaded some 580mb of updates I also updated to the latest kernel now I have a packages folder with 500+ mb of packages taking up good space questions are:
1.Have these packages been installed automatically if so can they be removed from the hard drive.
(if I yum update again it shows me all these packages again to update so how do I know they have been installed)
2.As have said I have updated to the latest kernel can the old kernel be deleted.
3.Are there any other files I can safely delete to recover disk space.

TIA!

Do a "man yum", it will somewhere give you an option to clear the cache.

Yes, if you have installed a new kernel and can verify that ut's working, you can delete the old one. To clear more disk space, you can delete man-pages, documentation, etc. but that's NOT recommended. Also, deleting usused locales may help.

& man yum:
provides the 'clean' option to liberate diskspace used up by everyhting yum downloads. Biggest clean-up is achieved by

& yum clean all

which will clean headers and packages from your disk (and some much smaller other stuff)

Thanks for the replies,
before I deleted anything I had a look at some of the applications like Firefox, sound juicer,helix player and pdf viewer and found that none of these had been updated to the latest versions,
though the updates are in the packages so I installed these manually and they updated ok and now when I do a #yum update these packages are now missing out of the list so it doesn't look as though #yum update did anything other than download the packages, should I have entered another command to actually update the app's or do I have to do them individually.

Not sure if it is the same thing or not, but when I tried to install something (I don't remember what it was) with Yum once, it kind of screwed up and didn't install the packages. After messing with my system for a while (finding out what versions where correct and wrong, all were still the old versions), I typed the same command that I typed in the first-place. Doing this caused Yum to check the repo, check the dependencies, and then it wanted to download the packages again. As soon as it tried, it saw that it already had those packages in its cache, and proceeded to install them.

So, if your packages don't install, it might be worth it to just try running yum again.