Mandrake question

[Evan Leibovitch]

Madison Kelly wrote:

> I got a copy of Mandriva and it has quickly made me feel dense. :p

No different from what I went through when learning Debian. Just a
slight culture shocklet.

>   Basically, for my program's manual I am trying to figure out what
> command line call will install a set of applications. In Debian terms
> this would be:
>
> # apt-get install foo bar baz
>
>   I think I need to use 'urpmi' but when I, for example, issue:
>
> # urpmi --install nano
>
>   It tells me that it can't find 'nano'. When I run 'rpmdrake' and
> search for 'nano' though it finds it just fine. The trick is that I
> really want to figure out a command-line app that will handle the
> install.


Usually  `urpmi nano`, without options, is enough to install nano and
any necessary pre-reqs.

The system will first check whether nano is installed, and if not it
will look for its RPM on your available "media" (collections of
available packages, whether online or on CD/DVD). You can see  a list of
where urpmi is looking with `urpmq --list-media`. (`urpmq` is your
all-purpose tool for querying the urpmi database.) You can also examine
/etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg

Mandriva does not come pre-installed knowing about any online package
locations (though starting with version 2006, the GUI urpmi tool knows
how to query for 'official' online locations for updates and packages
not on the CD/DVD media).

To teach urpmi where to find online repositories of packages that aren't
on the distribution media, go to
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/Downloads/MirrorFinder which will
give you the right urpmi setups depending on what collections, and what
locations,  you want to add. (Note: what it lists as "PLF" collections
includes packages which Mandrake themselves won't include for legal
reasons such as libcss and video codecs.)

There is also the site http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ (_not_
'easyurpmi.org') but I like the page at Mandrivaclub better (you don't
need to belong to the club to use it).

The urpmi file listings themselves are located in /var/lib/urpmi though
AFAIK they're not meant for manual editing.

HTH.

- Evan
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