Using YUM (Yellow dog Updated Modified) to update Red Hat Linux
Written by Jan Labanowski: jkl at ccl.net in Oct 2003.

Up to recently I used apt+rpm package to keep my Red Hat Linux in sync with
updates: 
http://www.ccl.net/cca/software/UNIX/updating-redhat/.
But recently I had problems with the freshrpms.net site and looked at
another updates. Tell you what... I may even like it more...
Go to: http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/ and read.
Then click on the [Download] link on the left navigation bar and retrieve
the RPM archive which is good for me (for Red Hat 9, I took the 
yum-2.0.4-1.noarch.rpm  whose local copy is
here.

Then, I installed RPM as:

    rpm -Uhv yum-2.0.4-1.noarch.rpm 


It is ready to go, and you can update your RedHat by typing:

   yum update

It will first check what is installed, produce a list of things which need
to be updated, and then asks you:

   Is it OK
 
Say yes, and it will keep getting the rpm packages from the yum repository
and installing them for you. It will even update kernel for you...

Occassionally yum was hunging up on me, especially on older computers...
If you see that for an hour nothing changes in the xterm window where you
typed "yum update", open another window, type: reboot and when your
computer is up again, type "yum update" again at the root prompt to finish
the job.