How to install packages for old version of Fedora?

Question

I'm using a Fedora 13 VM, and I need to install some old rpms, but only have the source rpm files. I know that I can use rpmbuild --rebuild to build the binaries, but for whatever reason, rpm-build isn't installed with yum, and I can only find a source rpm file of rpm-build for fc13. So it's a bit of a recursive problem.

The specific rpms I need are libvncserver, and obviously rpm-build, but it would be ideal to know how to start with a generic SRPM and get it to work on Fedora 13, for any future needs that come up.

How can I solve this? I'm open to any suggestions, but I must use Fedora 13.

Answer 1

You can probably just use the yum repo they include with the full DVD ISO. I downloaded the ISO to a RHEL6 server, mounted it on loopback and created the following in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo:

[root@vlp-xxx tmp]# cat /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
[fedora]
name='Fedora base sur DVD - monter le dvd dans /repo/dvd'
baseurl=file:///mnt/tmp
enabled=0
gpgcheck=0

Which then gave me all the Fedora 13 rpm's:

[root@vlp-xxx tmp]# yum list available --disablerepo='*' --enablerepo=fedora | head
Loaded plugins: product-id, security, subscription-manager
Available Packages
BackupPC.noarch                        3.1.0-13.fc13                      fedora
ConsoleKit.i686                        0.4.1-5.fc13                       fedora
ConsoleKit-libs.i686                   0.4.1-5.fc13                       fedora
ConsoleKit-x11.i686                    0.4.1-5.fc13                       fedora
DeviceKit-power.i686                   1:0.9.0-1.fc13                     fedora
GConf2.i686                            2.28.1-1.fc13                      fedora
GConf2-devel.i686                      2.28.1-1.fc13                      fedora
GConf2-gtk.i686                        2.28.1-1.fc13                      fedora
[...snip...]

And your package seems to be in there:

[root@vlp-xxx tmp]# yum info rpm-build --disablerepo='*' --enablerepo=fedora
Loaded plugins: product-id, security, subscription-manager
Installed Packages
[...snip...]

Available Packages
Name        : rpm-build
Arch        : i686
Version     : 4.8.0
Release     : 14.fc13
Size        : 125 k
Repo        : fedora
Summary     : Scripts and executable programs used to build packages
URL         : http://www.rpm.org/
License     : GPLv2+
Description : The rpm-build package contains the scripts and executable programs
            : that are used to build packages using the RPM Package Manager.

Answer 2

I would start by making a workable version of rpmbuild:

• get the source-rpm
• unpack the sources using unrpm, rpm2cpio, etc.
• review the spec-file, manually apply the patches
• use the same (or equivalent) configure options as done in the %configure part of the spec file.
• install the result.
• use that version of rpmbuild to build from its source-RPM.
• install that rpm.

After that, you should be ready to build packages on Fedora13.

Answer 3

Old Fedora releases are archived at http://archive.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/ — you can edit the files in /etc/yum.repos.d/ to point at the appropriate release there. Or, just download the individual RPMs you need.

Please, though, make sure you keep such a system isolated from the Internet (and be careful even using it to access Internet services), because Fedora 13 stopped receiving security updates almost five years ago.