corticalhomunculus Posted February 1, 2005 Report Share Posted February 1, 2005 I've tried to figure this out, but usually whenever urpmi gets brought up someone goes rabid for "easyurpmi". This is all well and good for those with their linux box hooked up to the 'net, I don't have that luxury unfortunately so it does little good for me to have some command line text pointing to file servers. does anyone put out basic downloadable packs of commonly upgraded programs/files (besides waiting for the next version of mandrake)? Or is sifting through ftp lists of things like "starbzn-0.11.2.44.0skir15.bz2.txt" just part of the joy of using linux that I haven't adapted to yet? ...Let it be known, if you find yourself moving out into the @#%$ wilderness try and find a wilderness where people demand broadband.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted February 1, 2005 Report Share Posted February 1, 2005 umm... you can use easyurpmi even if you only have a dialup connection. but without any network it gets a little complicated. you would need at least one computer/operating system (maybe dualboot) in order to access the net. from there you could got to the ftp-mirrors and download all packages you might need one by one, which is a hell of a job, because of dependencies. say, e.g. you want to upgrade your kdebase, then you will theoretically need to update the other kde-apps, too. otherwise, the system might become unstable. once you have downloaded all packages on a separate partition, you can add this special partition in the mandrake-control-center as a software repository. or you can burn everything on cd/dvd and use that one as your update source. but i suggest that if your system works well (=nothing is really buggy), don't change your system until you obtain(purchase/download) the next release (in this case 10.2). this will make updating easier for you. just my two cents. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
corticalhomunculus Posted February 1, 2005 Author Report Share Posted February 1, 2005 Yeah thats what I figured...I have no net connection at home at all, and the only one i have access to in order to download files is a dialup averaging 33.6, painful to sift and achieve through, especially when a bad download corresponds to a waste of a night tying up someone else's phone line. I thought maybe there were distro packs out there with software that fills some gaps/upgrades those included in mandrake, seems what i'm reffering to does exist it's just called 10.2. perhaps i'm still a bit too used to windows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted February 1, 2005 Report Share Posted February 1, 2005 I thought maybe there were distro packs out there with software that fills some gaps/upgrades those included in mandrake, seems what i'm reffering to does exist it's just called 10.2. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> most linux distributions get usually upgraded every six months. so when you get 10.2, it is a much improved version that usually ships with a newer kernel, new kde and gnome packages and lots of new apps, as well as bugfixes. however you are free to upgrade your system whenever you want. you can do it from cds e.g. once in one or two years or download the latest patches on a weekly basis. it is up to you. :) before i had broadband, i ran my redhad ans suse distros for quite some time and they were more stable than my windows box, although they never got patched. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
corticalhomunculus Posted February 2, 2005 Author Report Share Posted February 2, 2005 No question mandrake is more stable (in that there is no such thing as a "critical upgrade"), and thus far any issues I've had have been fixed with a little forum searching and tinkering. Mostly I'm just interested in having more to play with, considering how easy it is to backup and restore I just installed everything available in one go and am whittling away at the packages through discovery. How much do distros tend to change between versions? Meaning, for an average home user (word processing, image editing, video/music, a few games) how often is that next six month upgrade worth downloading? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted February 2, 2005 Report Share Posted February 2, 2005 How much do distros tend to change between versions? Meaning, for an average home user (word processing, image editing, video/music, a few games) how often is that next six month upgrade worth downloading? it depends on the distro and for what you use it. if you "only" do some word-processing, image editing, video and music, one upgrade per year is more than enough imho. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 I also don't have the luxury of using easyurpmi. I've always found rpmfind.net to be an extremely usefull resource. Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted February 4, 2005 Report Share Posted February 4, 2005 In fact what you probably could do is set up easy urpmi leaving the disks in the list too. You then fake a install... just getting the list of packages and then download elsewhere but using the --noclean option If you are missing anything when you then go ahead and install then hopefully its small libraries which were deps on the deps... (dep hell) then you use dial-up to resolve these ...?? When I didn't have DSL I found it a pain too. Id download stuff burn it to CDRW and then get home to find the deps themselves had more deps etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
corticalhomunculus Posted April 5, 2005 Author Report Share Posted April 5, 2005 In fact what you probably could do is set up easy urpmi leaving the disks in the list too. You then fake a install... just getting the list of packages and then download elsewhere but using the --noclean option <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'll give this a shot when I'm feeling ambitious, rpmfind and rpmseek have been saviors (if incomplete) in the meantime. Someday someway I'll get a phone line installed, heres to living in the middle of nowhere. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted April 6, 2005 Report Share Posted April 6, 2005 Or is sifting through ftp lists of things like "starbzn-0.11.2.44.0skir15.bz2.txt" just part of the joy of using linux that I haven't adapted to yet? That what I used to do before I got ADSL. From the T1 line at work, download everything that looked like it might be useful and burn it to a CD. Then take the CD home and update from it. Not very efficient... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted April 6, 2005 Report Share Posted April 6, 2005 theyinyeti: rpmfind is evil and eats babies. If you _must_ use a search engine like that, rpm.pbone.net is marginally less harmful. To the OP - we need to re-factor the question, really. Let me break it out; you are stuck in the wilderness with no broadband and you demand access to MDK goodness. If all you need are the stable packages from $YOUR_CURRENT_MDK_RELEASE, we have no problem. Get hold of the CDs from that release - from a friend, from a temporary broadband connection, from one of the cheap ISO vendors - or just get someone to download the entire main and contrib repositories and whack them on a DVD (possibly two) for you. It's easy to setup urpmi to use CDs as a source. If you want _updated versions_ between MDK releases, it's more tricky. There's no brilliant method for delivering this kind of thing right now even to people who HAVE broadband. The only really reliable way of using newer versions of things between releases is to download the source code and compile it yourself. Currently. New release strategies and / or things like autopackage and the backports project being worked on at zarb.org may change this in the future. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted April 6, 2005 Report Share Posted April 6, 2005 Could you explain please? In what way is rpmfind.net bad? I find what I'm looking for there, then track down the Mdk[MyVersion] line, click on it, download the file, open the requirements, that I don't have, or don't know, in other tabs, and do it over again, until I have all requirements. Great tool IMO, or is there something I did not realize yet? Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dyslexic Posted April 6, 2005 Report Share Posted April 6, 2005 (edited) Could you explain please? In what way is rpmfind.net bad?I find what I'm looking for there, then track down the Mdk[MyVersion] line, click on it, download the file, open the requirements, that I don't have, or don't know, in other tabs, and do it over again, until I have all requirements. Great tool IMO, or is there something I did not realize yet? Yves. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> With rpmfind.net it is very easy to end up with packages from the wrong version of Mandrake, including broken packages from random Cooker snapshots. And why wouldn't you want the automatic dependency resolution offered by official repositories? It's much easier than hunting things down yourself. To my knowledge, rpmfind doesn't have any Mandrake packages not included in the official distribution. Edited April 6, 2005 by Dyslexic Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted April 6, 2005 Report Share Posted April 6, 2005 And why wouldn't you want the automatic dependency resolution offered by official repositories? Good point Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted April 6, 2005 Report Share Posted April 6, 2005 Could you explain please? In what way is rpmfind.net bad?I find what I'm looking for there, then track down the Mdk[MyVersion] line, click on it, download the file, open the requirements, that I don't have, or don't know, in other tabs, and do it over again, until I have all requirements. Great tool IMO, or is there something I did not realize yet? Yves. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> With rpmfind.net it is very easy to end up with packages from the wrong version of Mandrake, including broken packages from random Cooker snapshots. Not if you're carefull: the Mandrake version appears in the URL. And why wouldn't you want the automatic dependency resolution offered by official repositories? It's much easier than hunting things down yourself. To my knowledge, rpmfind doesn't have any Mandrake packages not included in the official distribution.<{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, I would like to use the URPMI repositories, but: - Using a 56K modem, downloading the synthetisis file is awfully long. - Having all 3 CDs at home, I'm only really interested in other repositories (contrib...), which are regularly updated; what happens when the synthetisis file you downloaded is not in sync any more with what actually is on the server? (this I really don't know) - Last but not least, any file you download with a 56k modem is an additionnal burden. So I often prefer using an older version of a program, for which I already have most dependencies, than the "official" newer one, that wants to update loads of packages, often WITHOUT even a REAL NEED!!! (The requirements "require: lib (version = X.Y.Z)" are much more numerous than really needed.) - Related to this last point: I MUST be able to keep EVERY downloaded file somewhere, so that I don't have to reload again (for another PC, or for future reuse), again because every download is a burden with a 56k modem. Please prove me wrong. I'd love to simply have to use the URPMI repositories... Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.