How often do you update your Linux server software? If you have chosen yum to do this for you, you should have some packages that aren’t really necessary for update; they can even cause yum errors. In order to exclude some packages you should use of two methods proposed in this post.
The first one is to add excluded packages to the command line while running yum from console. This should look like:
yum –exclude=rhythmbox
The second way is to add excluded packages to yum configuration file. Just add a line like this to /etc/yum.conf:
exclude=rhythmbox syslinux etc
The second method is better if you periodically update your server software. For a one-time execution the first method will be much better.