While there are application groups for just about every category of software from graphics, software development, office productivity, multimedia, and others, there’s no specific group for security or auditing related packages. Here’s a list of the security and auditing related packages that are now available in the standard Fedora 12 repositories. From intrusion detection to data recovery, Fedora has come a long way in the last couple of years.

The default installations of Fedora 12 (64-bit intel and 32-bit ppc, at least) are really bloated. There are tons of new packages that don’t belong in a default installation. There are a ton more than I just don’t have any need for. To be fair, you can do a net install which gives you a smaller footprint to begin with and you have the option to customize the installations to avoid installing anything you don’t need in the first place. But do I really need special support packages for specific Lexmark printers by default? How about cheese, ivtv-firmware, or fpaste?

You might need to look at an RPM file and figure out what it needs, retrieve it by hand, and install the packages yourself.

I can’t figure out how to make yum ignore dependencies and I can’t find it by googling either. The yum-allowdowngrade package doesn’t do what I expected it to do. So I’ll just have to ignore yum for now and force rpm to do the job.

I don’t understand why some people think this is a complicated thing to set up, so here goes my approach which I think is the easiest method.  Perhaps you’re behind a very restrictive corporate firewall or you want to conserve bandwidth when you’re setting up several machines.  You can set …