So I  googled and apparently Screen doesn’t realize that GNOME terminal has its own scrollback buffer that it needs to use.

Putting the following in your .screenrc will fix the problem. It tells screen not to use xterm’s alternative window buffer.

termcapinfo xterm|xterms|xs ti@:te=\E[2J

Of course make sure you have defscrollback set too!

defscrollback 10000

I

Can anyone tell me what happened here? Wish they came out better.

At work servers are allowed to connect to the internet only through https on port 443. This means that yum repo’s must be configured to  connect to a secured mirror. If you are working under these circumstances hopefully there is a mirror for your repository that allows a https connection. In my case I was simply trying to access Fedoras EPEL and luckly redhat allows https for this repo at https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/

Run your repo RPM (In this case epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm)

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
delete file called epel-testing.repo

open epel.repo and change the file to represent the following:

[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 5 – $basearch
baseurl=https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/$basearch
enabled=1
failovermethod=priority
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL

and save.

make sure to run yum clean-all just in case