CentOS - Oct 2009 - CentOS 5.3 on X86_64: yum installs both i386 and x86_64 packages

Hello,

Is it advisable to clean up the system by deleting the i386 rpms? If so 
how do you know which ones to remove and which ones CentOS or RHEL 
require to be installed? You can use ?yum list installed \*.i386? to 
list all of the i386 rpms installed on your x86_64 system and I assume 
you could use ?yum remove installed \*.i386? to remove them all. If 
there were a few which were necessary to keep you could exclude them in 
yum.conf.

Thanks for the help,

Patrick

On Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:48:44 -0500
Patrick McEvoy wrote:
> Is it advisable to clean up the system by deleting the i386 rpms?
It depends on what you're doing.  If you really need some package which does
not exist in x86_64 version, use i386. If all you need exists in x86_64, there
is no need to use i386 packages.
> If so  how do you know which ones to remove and which ones CentOS or RHEL 
> require to be installed?
You don't actually require any i386 rpms  at all if you're not using any
i386
programs.

You may find the output of the following two commands interesting:

rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME}.%{ARCH}\n" | grep -v
'x86_64\|noarch\|gpg-pubkey' > list

rpm --test -e $(cat list)

You can remove all i386 packages with this command:

yum remove \*.i?86

If yum tells you that it's removing something you need at this point, then
you
should obviously stop and fix it (with excludes or whatever) before continuing.




-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com

Patrick McEvoy wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Is it advisable to clean up the system by deleting the i386 rpms?
>
> Patrick
Hi

I don't think this is a good idea. If we are talking about a workstation 
for a user, better keep, but if you talking about a server, maybe.

Most probably you will have to install some i386 packages at some point.

Regards

mg.