Centos is a "free" distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux which I enjoy using. Whilst it does not have Debian's apt-get for package management it does have yum, which is not as fast but still works pretty well in most circumstances. Unfortunately today I ran into a problem in a clean install of Centos 5.3 where yum was returning the following error:
Error Message: Metadata file does not match checksum
A quick look around "the Google" turned up the relatively simple solution; at the terminal execute as root:
yum clean all
yum makecache
yum update
This process will take a little time, but the end result should be a nice, clean yum repository cache, complete with no annoying meta-data errors.