Users of Fedora Core 5, 6, CentOS 5 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 are in for a rather sour and unpleasing treat.

Unfortunately, this is the reason for this blog post – and this is the reason we had such a tough time installing Fantastico, it just didn’t want to install! Well, I quickly learned of this “bug”, and I found a fix. The problem was the wget feature, and its version. Apparently, the newer ones (already installed on most servers) do not work as they’re supposed to. We’ll be replacing whatever version we have – with a known working version; wget-1.10.2-3.2.1

So, here are the install instructions. Simply pull out SSH, and run the following command as root:

For 32-bit:

rpm -qa wget ;
wget ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/mirrors/ftp.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/wget-1.10.2-3.2.1.i386.rpm
chattr -ia /usr/bin/wget
rpm -e wget ;
rpm -ivh –force wget-1.10.2-3.2.1.i386.rpm ;
rpm -qa wget ;

For 64-bit:

rpm -qa wget ;
wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Everything/x86_64/os/Fedora/wget-1.10.2-15.fc7.x86_64.rpm ;
chattr -ia /usr/bin/wget
rpm -e wget ;
rpm -ivh –force wget-1.10.2-15.fc7.x86_64.rpm ;
rpm -qa wget ;

Lastly, we’re going to add wget to yum.conf so that the OS doesn’t reinstall another version of wget over our working version – through one of its updates.

Let’s get to it:

nano /etc/yum.conf

Find the line exclude= and add “wget*” at the end (on the same line). Please ensure that wget* is not on its own line – this will seriously break yum.