1. I noticed 150-something updates on pup at the upper right of my window. I ran it just now; it opened 2 windows and I see nothing happening. Status bar is there with no progress/activity. Does it run in the background? Does it crash? Do I need to rerun it?

2. I tried running Applications!Add/Remove Software earlier. It said "You are attempting to run "pirut" which requires administrative privileges, but more information is needed in order to do so." So I typed in my root password, and it kept replying that some other process was running already. (Which I never ran--that's why I was running Application!Add/Remove Software after all.) This was before I even ran pup.

I'm missing emacs and a whole slew of other things. Looks like pup crashed. It wasn't "responding." Oh well.

Here it is! I reran pup and it's doing the same thing Applications!Add/Remove Software was doing: It says...

"Another application is running which is accessing software information."

What other application? Yum?

So now this means I'm stuck in this permanent situation in which I get "Another application is running which is accessing software information." even when I reboot and ask it to update or Applications!Add/Remove Software.

Is this a known bug?

Thanks.

I don't know if this can be considered a bug, but sometimes it happens with FC5. When PUP freeze, it is not enough to close or xkill the GUI. I have to look for pup with the ps command and kill it from the command line. In my case it is always the freezed session of pup that avoid to run pirut or pup again. Hope this will help...

Since they are making system changes, you can only run one instance of Yum-related programs at a time. Think of the mess if two instances of yum were making different changes at the same time ... To accomplish this, a yum process will create a lock file (from memory, /var/run/yum.pid). If this file already exists, then it will refuse to start. An unclean shutdown of a yum - related program will not clean up this lock file, so remove it manually.

After removing this, then run "yum -y update" as root to update your system. Don't worry about Pup or Pirut for now. You may get some dependency errors, which you will need to manually sort out. Post them here, and we will try to help.

After you have updated your system, then install "yumex" using yum. This is, IMO, a better alternative to Pirut and Pup. Then you can try to install emacs and whatever else you want. Alternatively, don't worry about GUI frontends to Yum - just learn the Yum commands. It is really easy if you read the man page.

I hope this helps
--Ian

I had a heck of a time logging back into this site (this one, LinuxQuestions.com) last night and this morning. I'd use the user name and password I had set up, and get bounced out with a message saying I've exhausted n of 5 login attempts. I tried three or four new login registrations. This time I'm finally through again. (Must've been 10minutemail. I don't know; I would get in briefly enough to start a Reply and then when I would hit <Submit> it would say here my user name and/or password wasn't sufficient.) Trying it again; everyone's been nice, I just wanted to be polite and reply.

Thank you both for the advice. What I've done is this:
killall -9 yum-updatesd

That effectively eliminated what was interfering with my ability to then go to Applications!Add/Remove Software and add more stuff. (Which I proceeded to do.)

Still, later on (this morning in fact) I'm running as an ordinary user, and this same thing that popped up last night in the upper right hand corner of Gnome--this brown paper bag--alerts me, again, that I have "Security" updates or something to that effect. Over 160 or so are waiting.

The same thing would come up very intermittently after I first installed core 6 yesterday. So this morning I decided to let that feature do its thing. (For everyone else who's new to fedora like me--don't let the seemingly frozen up appearance of the Package Updater lead you to believe it's crashed. It just takes a long time to assemble stuff, i.e., 30 minutes and longer.)

All right, so Package Updater is "Updating Software" right now, hopefully with the 180-odd updates it kept asserting it wanted to Security Update me with.

As for yum, it's all too new for me. I only first heard of it a few days ago. (I'm still working on the concept of RPMs. :-)

From what I understand of the generous replies to this post, yum is still a little new.

Am I understanding this when I ask if what I did aforementioned with the killall -9 statement that that is un unclean shutdown?

What does removing it manually mean? Taking some file out of a system directory permanantly?

Thanks again for responding.

A little more permanent fix for this issue is to go to system-->administration-->services. Uncheck the box next to yum-updatesd. Upon a reboot, your system will not automatically check for updates, and keep yum free.

Excellent. I'll try that. Thanks.

(I'll still see the occasional brown paper bag in the upper right of the Gnome screen, though right? That's on a separate ([non-]yum-updatesd) process? Those alerts seem useful, if they won't pop up all the time.)

Yum is not really "new". It has been used in all releases of Fedora.

Basically, Yum is a package manager that installs RPMs. It automatically downloads and installs the RPM package and all its dependencies, and will intelligently install updates and even upgrade from one distro release to another.

Pirut, Pup, Yumex, etc are all graphical frontends for Yum. Pup basically runs a "yum -y update". For some reason, Pup is very slow and appears to freeze.

When I said manually remove, I meant to delete that lock file. As I explained above, when yum starts it checks for this file. If it exists, it gives an error message and quits. If it doesn't exist, then it creates it. If a yum process shuts down uncleanly (eg -9 switch to kill or it crashes), it won't remove this lock file. This lock file is then known as "stale" and you have to delete it manually before yum will run again. When you start yum again, it will recreate this lock file.

--Ian

Is pup what I'm using when I wait 2 hours for dependencies to be found if I just want to download Asteroids?

Also, I'm confused on this point: If I start yum again (or invoke yum again from a command line at some later date)--and the lock file is by necessity recreated automatically as a consequence (or side effect) of that--then (and I ask in all human sincerity), why am I to delete this lock file manually (if it's just going to be recreated again)?

Or is that fine? I am supposed to in best practice just go back and delete the lock file whenever I finish yumming something?

Thought that had been explained fairly well.
Yum puts the lock file there to prevent 2 versions of yum running at once.
When yum shuts down properly it removes it.
If yum crashes, or is shut down uncleanly the lock file is not removed, and you can't restart yum (or pup or pirut or yumex).
That's when you need to remove it manually.

Your explanation combined with the others has produced a clearer picture for me. Thanks.