Package Manager
All modern Linux distributions come with a package manager such as Yum or RPM. The Linux distribution included on the Arduino Yun is no exception. It uses OPKG (Open PacKaGe manager).
To get an upto date list of package you use the command opkg update to list the package available opkg list and there's install, update and remove commands for actually managing the packages. The instructions are covered in details in the link above.
Configuration
You can change the behaviour of OPKG via a configuration file /etc/opkg.conf . This contains the details of where OPKG downloads the packages from and where they are installed to. It can also incorporate signing and proxy settings if you need those for your system.
Sources
When you install an image to the Yun it contains some default locations where the package manager can look for new packages. And most of the time that's fine. However, if you find yourself not being able to install a third party component, in my case Python's requests[security] package. Then you might want to check some other package repositories. Note that some of these locations have packages for multiple systems so for the Arduino Yún you want to look for the "generic ar71xx" branch.
Arduino.cc
http://downloads.arduino.cc/openwrtyun/1/packages/
OpenWRT
Linino
Warning!
You may find that using other sources for packages causes things to fail. This is because the image creators have been very specific in what packages they put together to ensure they all work. Mixing packages is almost guaranteed to cause you additional work. What you need to go is to unpick the chain of packages for your problem installation. Once you've done this you can remove the old packages and re-install from the new repository.
Creating Packages
If you've got a lot of components you have created to put on your Yún and want to deploy to several devices then creating your own ipk packages might be a good solution.
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