“No package <package name> available.”?

Question

I have installed a few packages using the yum package manager (e.g., I've installed the statistical programming language R), but lately I have been unable to install packages. For example, I want to install the package tsclient so that I can create a remote desktop connect with another computer, so at the terminal prompt I type sudo yum install tsclient and receive the following output:

Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
http://archive.linux.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/updates/16/i386/repodata/66dcc982036ed370618656c7b53dd7aa422663a305d2753590a01b9100080902-comps-f16.xml.gz:
[Errno 14] HTTP Error 404 - Not Found :
http://archive.linux.duke.edu/pub/fedora/linux/updates/16/i386/repodata/66dcc982036ed370618656c7b53dd7aa422663a305d2753590a01b9100080902-comps-f16.xml.gz
Trying other mirror.
http://fedora.mirror.netriplex.com/updates/16/i386/repodata/66dcc982036ed370618656c7b53dd7aa422663a305d2753590a01b9100080902-comps-f16.xml.gz:
[Errno 14] HTTP Error 404 - Not Found :
http://fedora.mirror.netriplex.com/updates/16/i386/repodata/66dcc982036ed370618656c7b53dd7aa422663a305d2753590a01b9100080902-comps-f16.xml.gz
Trying other mirror.
ftp://ftp.uci.edu/mirrors/fedora/linux/updates/16/i386/repodata/66dcc982036ed370618656c7b53dd7aa422663a305d2753590a01b9100080902-comps-f16.xml.gz:
[Errno 14] FTP Error 550 :
ftp://ftp.uci.edu/mirrors/fedora/linux/updates/16/i386/repodata/66dcc982036ed370618656c7b53dd7aa422663a305d2753590a01b9100080902-comps-f16.xml.gz
Trying other mirror. updates/group_gz                                 
| 431 kB     00:00      Setting up Install Process No package tsclient
available. Error: Nothing to do

Why is this happening? How do I fix it?

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

ls /etc/yum.repos.d/
adobe-linux-i386.repo  fedora-updates.repo
fedora.repo            fedora-updates-testing.repo

Answer 1

I'm not sure why you are seeing the intermediate errors — try sudo yum clean metadata and see if that clears up. But the key issue is that tsclient appears to be orphaned (no maintainer) and deprecated. More info here: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/tsclient

tsclient is just a front-end program; you can instead run rdesktop and vncviewer directly.