Linux Source Codes (RedHat)

If anyone is curious as to how you download the source code to anything in Linux (excluding proprietary closed-source programs), here's how to do it in RedHat-like systems that use yum as their package manager:

yumdownloader --source packagename

That will fetch the source RPM for the package. For instance yumdownloader --source firefox downloads firefox-3.0.8-1.fc10.src.rpm on my Fedora 10 system.

The source RPM can be opened with an archive manager and extracted. You can then tinker with it and rebuild a custom new RPM, for instance if you want Apache to be compiled with suexec support built in, which doesn't come standard in any RedHat distro I've ever used.

Note: if you don't have yumdownloader installed, it's part of the yum-utils package. yum install yum-utils.