I am using Fedora 17 xfce and I am programming in Python 2.7.3. Fedora uses a package manager called yum. I have a python script that searches for packages like this:
os.system will not return any of the output. The question you linked to has the right answer. If you only got the first line of the output, maybe you were trying to read it line by line?
The right way to get the entire output is this:
import subprocess
package = raw_input("...")
p = subprocess.Popen(["yum", "install", package], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
out, err = p.communicate()
# Wait for the process to exit before reading
p.wait()
full_output = out.read()