Software Center in CentOS

[expmrb]

I am new to Linux and I am trying to run CentOS in a desktop machine. So, I am guessing that does CentOS has a software center like Ubuntu? Or, something similar?

[TrevorH]

The primary package manager in CentOS is yum which is a command line tool. There is also a "Gnome Software" GUI thing but yum is preferred.

[expmrb]

Okay, so how can I search for any program through 'yum' say vlc or utorrent?

[TrevorH]

TL;DR, use yum list $pattern or yum search string where $pattern is a glob for what you want to earch for - for example yum list \*vlc\* or yum search torrent - the fine man page has more details about how to use yum - man yum

You won't find many multimedia packages in the CentOS provided repos. There is no vlc or utorrent. You can find vlc in the third party repo nux-dextop and possibly in rpmfusion. I don't see utorrent in any of my repos though there are copies of ktorrent, qbittorrent, rtorrent and deluge in EPEL and nux.

Additional packages are often in 3rd party repos. Information on additional CentOS repos is available at http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories Pay attention to the reference on yum-priorities.

[ron7000]

• in centos 7.6 there are 2 software things [when using gnome which is the default, if you specically chose kde or some other desktop then below does not necessarily apply].
• top right of screen, Applications menu, System Tools submenu: "Software Update" and "Software"
• for "software update" that will attempt to fetch all updates to software (rpm's) already installed on your system, and they will fetch and download them from whatever repositories are defined under /etc/yum.repos.d/
• for "software" that will also only know what's available based on defined repositories under /etc/yum.repos.d/ but this guy will have a search bar at the top where you can for example enter "mp3" and it will basically show all available software (for the repos) having that syntax and somewhat related; it's pretty nifty
• the "software" guy can be flakely and not install, usually it will give a popup saying u want to install this but this is also required do you want to, most times it will work. Sometimes it will hang, need to close window, start again, and will work. Sometimes it gives no good indication things are progressing successfully... hey it's free. So for that reason sometimes the text interface of "yum install whatever" is better but then you need to know the specific case-sensitive syntax of whatever otherwise it'll report "not found"; it is here where you go to "software" search guy, find that specific syntax, then go back to text based "yum install whatever"
• for repositories, the base centos7 repo should be available by default, in my opinion the best are EPEL and NUX-Dextop and ELREPO.
  
  nux: https://li.nux.ro/repos.html
  EPEL: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
  ELREPO: http://elrepo.org/tiki/tiki-index.php
  
  once those (and others) are installed, in that "software" guy window, left side menu at bottom, expand that repository and you can browse thousands of available stuff each with a brief description. You can google other repositories available but be cautious.
  
  https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResou ... positories
  
  the command line name for the "software" guy under Applications-System Tools, I do not know; it is NOT gnome-software. if anybody knows, let me know.