Fixing Broken YUM on Cent OS 5.9

CentOS 5.9 comes with Python 2.4.3 installed. I installed a different Python version (2.7) and all hell broke loose. Yum stopped working with errors like a particular Python module was missing.

I searched for fixing this problem on various forums and found no useful help. Finally, I could fix it with following actions:

Delete conflicting Python

• Search other Python distributions on your machine. Run $whereis python and delete all directories that point to any Python version but 2.4.

• Delete contents of /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/ by running $rm -rf /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/yum/*

• Delete contents of /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/rpmUtils/*

• You will start seeing errors as No module named yum now.

Install YUM

• Figure out what yum version does your machine expects. $rpm -q yum.

• On my machine, output was: yum-3.2.22-40.el5.centos

• Get the package: $wget http://yum.baseurl.org/download/3.2/yum-3.2.22.tar.gz

• Unzip and build it.

• $make
  • You might see following error:
    
    for d in rpmUtils yum etc docs po; do make PYTHON=python -C $d; [ $? = 0 ] || exit 1 ; done
    intltool-update –gettext-package=yum –pot
    make[1]: intltool-update: Command not found
    make[1]: *** [yum.pot] Error 127
    make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/work/packages/yum-3.2.22/po’
    make: *** [subdirs] Error 1

• I fixed the above error by changing the yum-3.2.22/Makefile and removing dependency “po” in the first line. It is harmless. If you start installing the intltool rpm, it ends up in many dependencies. It looked futile to me.

• Try make again. It will work now.

• Now, do make install

• This will copy yum related modules in your Python site-packages.

Install YUM dependencies

• Now, visit this link

• Look at CentOS 5.9 section and copy all lines for RPM installation in a file.

• Add –force to each rpm installation request as follows:

$~/work/packages/yum-3.2.22# rpm -Uvh –force http://mirror.centos.org/centos-5/5.9/os/x86_64/CentOS/yum-3.2.22-40.el5.centos.noarch.rpm

• yum should work now