As you've discovered, the downloads you were watching were the header files. I do believe that when you created your RHN machine account, it did a similar, but reverse action. I believe that your machine told the RHN servers what was installed locally. Yum manages itself locally, RHN managed itself on their servers. This is my understanding. -----Original Message----- From: yum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:yum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Johnny Canuck Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2004 3:25 PM To: yum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [Yum] total yum newbie | RH 7.3 box | # packages? Greetings - Various colleagues suggested trying yum to manage package upgrade on my RH box (7.3). Since RH went corporate, up2date doesn't work for 7.3, and I was looking for an alternative. Tried apt-get, with little success. Installed yum, and am in the process of trying it out. So, I ran yum check-update. and after an hour of watching it continue to download package after package (whether I wanted them or not), I kill the process, and tried something more direct: say, update one single package. So, I tried yum update grip But, yum once again resumed downloading package after package, many of which I know for a fact aren't relevant to updating grip. So, my interpretation is that yum basically wants you to download EVERY package there is for your box first, before you can do anything else? I suspect this can't be true, but don't know why it seems to be doing just this for me. What I liked about up2date is that it compared the RPM's in the RPM db with changed RPM's, and only 'downloaded' those I needed - I'm guessing yum is supposed to do this, but sitting here in my second hour of watching packages download makes me wonder. What obvious thing am I missing? Newbie question, so set flame-throwers to 'singe' only. :-) Thanks in advance! _______________________________________________ Yum mailing list Yum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/mailman/listinfo/yum