FEDORA gurus ,


I’m running fedora 13 on my virtual machine. This is not my first introduction to open source I have worked before on REDHAT and SUN Solaris O/S and in my opinion OPEN-SOURCE is freaking cool and powerful. But what was different this time around was use of much popular ‘yum’ utility. I know what yum can do to solve the dependencies nightmare but lately yum has been acting strange when it comes to installing any number of packages. Let me summarize my misery as short and effective as possible.

I could make a ‘yum’ to install me the initial packages for e.g yum install ‘X Window System’ just perfectly. This happens with x number of applications for the first time then as I attempt to install the remaining packages for e.g yum install vncserver. I’m thrown the following error message.

Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again


This message has haunted me for days and after countless sleepless nights I cannot get around this error message. In my current settings I have configured yum to use proxy by editing yum. Conf file. I have used the environment variable http_proxy to notify my proxy address too. Other than the usual settings I have made the following changes to get around the problem but with no success.

1. yum clean all

2. Edited /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo and /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo and un-comment all the lines that start with the term baseurl and place a comment before all lines that start with mirrorlist.

3. Edit your /etc/hosts
• 80.239.156.215 mirrors.fedoraproject.org
• 213.129.242.84 mirrors.rpmfusion.org

4. I have also tried deleting media file in yum.repos.d directory but to no use.


I mean at time I don’t like Open Source is usually such times when I cannot understand its unreliable nature. It works at one moment and on the second it loses trust. I know there has to be some technical reason for this (everything has to happen for a reason); but in my research working with yum it involves around something similar to the points I mentioned above. I have read through numerous forums where engineers like me are crying their eyes out for someone to help them solve the yum error mystery.

I mean there is no one answer to the specific problem as on some forum I read about disabling IPV6 option on other I have read solution which goes on changing the enabled option to 1 in the fedora.repo and fedora-updates.repo files. I mean I can agree to the point that some solution that work for one set of users does not necessarily works for the set.

I’m clueless to what works for me as I have tried almost everything (excepting writing a new kernel that is)

I would love someone who is really know the background story of this estranged yum utility and explain to me its dualism nature. It’s irking me to the point where I feel liking to shave my head off. I know there must be something that I’m missing out from the entire picture….and No don’t tell me to update to Fedora 14 I have tried that and the problem is the same.
Thanks you techies.

Regards,
me

Can you post the content of your repo files ? .. also, is your internet access via a proxy .. yum doesn't respect the http_proxy environment variable