I got Fedora Core 5 and I know it doesn't play mp3 out of the box. So I downloaded xmms and installed it using yum before I knew I had to install the xmms-mp3 package. When I try and do yum on it this is what I get:

Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
core [1/6]
updates [2/6]
greysector-all [3/6]
greysector-all-noarch [4/6]
greysector [5/6]
extras [6/6]
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Parsing package install arguments
No Match for argument: xmms-mp3
Nothing to do

I do actually have the .rmp downloaded. Am I missing a repository or something else?

you can look here. mp3 and other stuff with not clear GPL licencing are not included in Fedora's repositories.

I don't care if Fedora wants to ride a high horse about the mp3 format. I've got some 1500 mp3s and I'm not taking the time to convert them even if it is better.

I know you can get mp3s to play using xmms. I'm just wondering if anybody had an idea why yum said there was nothing to do with the package.

Because yum uses Fedora repositories which "wants to ride a high horse"? If you want to play mp3s, it's up to you to install necessary stuff for it. And if you have impassable problem with that, you can always try different distro.

cobolt_dink, you can add to your configuration so that yum will search more repositories to easily get extra packages (like xmms-mp3) automatically. Fedora's "official" repos are pretty limited in some ways, so I'd recommend doing that aside from the MP3 issue anyway. But even before that, are you saying you already have an rpm file for the package? If that's the case, you should be able to do "rpm -Uvh xmms-mp3.rpm" (or whatever the file's called) and bypass yum altogether. That won't do fancy things like automatically resolve dependencies, of course, but it is the standard way to add a single package, and that should do the trick here. yum and the yum repositories are for downloading and installing packages in one go, so it sounds like you've already done half the job.