Updates for Fedora Core 2

I have an old (virtual) server which, for various support and compatibility reasons, is still running Fedora Core 2 Linux, released back in 2005. Despite this being an old, unsupported, version of the OS I wanted it to be as up-to-date as possible, and this is how I went about it.

The Fedora Legacy Project kept looking after the updates for the old “Fedora Core” versions but their site, and many of the mirrors, are no longer active. Entering yum update at the command prompt no longer worked. After a bit of hunting I found an active mirror in Germany and edited my /etc/yum.conf file to read as follows:

 1[main]
 2cachedir=/var/cache/yum
 3debuglevel=2
 4logfile=/var/log/yum.log
 5pkgpolicy=newest
 6distroverpkg=redhat-release
 7tolerant=1
 8exactarch=1
 9exclude=kernel*
10
11[base]
12gpgcheck=0
13name=Fedora Core $releasever - Base
14baseurl=http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/download.fedoralegacy.org/fedora/$releasever/os/$basearch
15
16[updates]
17gpgcheck=0
18name=Fedora Core $releasever updates
19baseurl=http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/download.fedoralegacy.org/fedora/$releasever/updates/$basearch
20
21[legacy-utils]
22gpgcheck=0
23name=Fedora Legacy utilities for Fedora Core $releasever
24baseurl=http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/download.fedoralegacy.org/fedora/$releasever/legacy-utils/$basearch

Now my yum update command works and installed an additional 357 updates. I doubt any more will come along, but at least this system is as up-to-date as it’s going to get.