I recently rediscovered some interesting functionality in the yum application used by CentOS, Fedora, Red Hat, and others. Namely, meta-packages or “groups” that will install a set of packages geared toward a specific function.

For instance, to list installed and available groups, do as such:

# yum grouplist

This will provide a list of all installed and available meta-packages by name. To install, say, a LAMP stack on a base CentOS install, run the following:

# yum groupinstall ‘Web Server’ ‘MySQL Database’

Happy Hacking!

/cs