RHEL5: Forbid installation of i386 packages on 64-bit systems?

Question

Everytime I install something with yum, it tries to install both x86_64 and i386 versions of the package if both are available. Is there any way I can forbid that without specifying the arch of the package?

Answer 1

Add multilib_policy=best to your /etc/yum.conf

Yum will now try to install the "best" package.arch for your system and it will only install that one (as long as it is available).

Assuming you're on a 64-Bit system, yum will first try to install package.x86_64, if that doesn't exist it will fall back to i386 and noarch.

The default setting is multilib_policy=all, which means to install all possible arches.

Answer 2

Use the exclude function in yum.conf:

exclude=*.i386 *.i686

Answer 3

It would try to install i386 version if you have x86_64 version already installed.

Pay attention that if you use exclude in yum.conf you could exclude packages only being available in i386 arch

A safer way could be to explicitly request the arch at install time:

yum install package.x86_64

Answer 4

-x, --exclude=package Exclude a specific package by name or glob from updates on all repositories. Configuration Option: exclude

--disableexcludes=[all|main|repoid] Disable the excludes defined in your config files. Takes one of three options: all == disable all excludes main == disable excludes defined in [main] in yum.conf repoid == disable excludes defined for that repo

above from man you can use or you can install yumex which give gui u can choose the rpm which you need to install.

http://www.yum-extender.org/blog/

Answer 5

What works for me is removing all of the ix86 packages from the machine. Now it never asks me to install any 32bit anything.

First setup your .rpmmacros like this:

cat ~/.rpmmacros
%_query_all_fmt %%{name}-%%{version}-%%{release}.%%{arch}

Then run this (I'm assuming bash):

rpm -qa | egrep "i.86$"

That will give you a list of non x86_64 rpms currently installed. You can remove all of them with this:

rpm -e $(rpm -qa | egrep "i.x86$")

Now you have a pure 64bit system.

-Dave