How to fix yum can't use in Fedora11 after install.

Update: This problem has now been resolved by the Fedora Community. But you may still not be able to download the updates properly from the mirrors due to the busy network and rush.

The recently released Fedora 11 Leonidas has some issues with it’s regular update process. Many users are getting a strange error which complains about the inability of the update system to retrieve the repository metadata, namely repomd.xml. You can see the error as attached in this inlet below:

Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml) for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try again

When we tried to install Fedora 11 for the first time, we also faced a similar problem. A quick twitter search brought us to a conclusion that we were not alone. But a little tweaking of a few system files brought us back on track. In this article we tell you, how to go about resolving the problem in case you face it too.

• You need to edit two of your repository files: /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo and/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo. Now un-comment all the lines that start with the term baseurl and place a comment before all lines that start with mirrorlist. This should be done for both the above files.

• Now edit your /etc/hosts file and append the following to it’s contents:

  80.239.156.215          mirrors.fedoraproject.org 213.129.242.84          mirrors.rpmfusion.org

Now try updating your system or installing any software via Yum. You will see, the error is now resolved and the error message is not shown anymore.