Hello,

On my first day with Linode, I am wondering:

1. What is this Swap Image that consumes 256 MB? I could not find the answer on linode.com and googling Swap Image leads me to some fancy web development strategies...

2. I installed Fedora Core 6 (I chose that one because I had to choose one) and I don't see a compiler. Is that normal or did I miss something during installation? Can you confirm the best way to install gcc is yum?

Thanks in advance!

The swap image is the disk space used by the Linux virtual memory system. Google for 'swap partition' - that's what it's called on a non-virtual machine.

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/ Peter

That's correct.

-Chris

Thank you for your answer. Could you confirm yum is also the best way to install gcc and others on CentOS 4 and 5?

yum is the best way to install anything on CentOS.

If it's not in the default repository, yum is still the best way, via a trustworthy third-party repository (after verifying that you really need that package, and no substitute is in the default repos).

If it's not in a trustworthy repository, then you're installing from source. After you're _really_, _really_ sure it's worth the trouble.

I've never used yum as an installer - is the uninstaller named yuk? It seems fitting somehow. Yum and yuk. Say, I bet this is why I'm never asked to name software projects...

James

I wrote a wonderful system for work a few years back called PLARF... Password Lookup And Reset Facility. Somehow it didn't win much user acceptance. They barf'd on the name, I guess!

Anyway, "yum" has a boring pedigry... "yellowdog updater; modified".

Yellowdog was a Linux distribution, so I guess that's where the code base originated!

_________________
Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)