Linux / Fedora: How To Freeze Packages From Yum Update in 3 Steps

RPM based systems like RedHat, Fedora or CentOS often have the system configured for automatic updates. This ensures that your software is always upto date. However sometimes there are software you don’t want to update via yum update like for example RSSOwl. RSSOwl, for example, currently has a broken rpm distribution in extras repository. Standard yum update will update the correct version directly downloaded from site and break it. So you would want to prevent it from being updated. For such scenarios there is a simple procedure for you to follows:

1. First you should install yum yum-versionlock plugin:
yum -y install yum-versionlock.

2. Open /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/versionlock.conf and set enabled = 1; save it.

3. Create /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/versionlock.list and add the packages (along with version information as shown below) you want to exclude, one per line. For example I added a single line: rssowl-1.2.1-0.1 to exclude rssowl from ever being updated again by yum.

Note: You can run rpm -qa to get list of all installed packages along with their version information. grep it for your required packages.

You are done!