Chad wrote:
On Monday 24 Feb 2003 2:38 pm, you wrote:don't most rpm systems now come with automatic updaters? e.g. mandrake - urpmi, redhat - up2date, connectiva, - apt-rpm. suse - yast online update etc etc. does urpmi work jason?urpmi uses a slightly different system which has it's pros and cons. With urpmi the repositories are mirrored by lots of different groups which means that you can generally find a local Urpmi source for updates and packages. e.g. tranzpeer http://debian.attica.net.nz/ maitains a local mirror for Mandrake (along with gentoo and others No RH though ;-)). All you have to do is add the path to the updates folder for your dist version or a RPM folder and the package list to urpmi. Urpmi then downloads a list of the updates and other pacakges avaliable along with a description of each update or package. After that updating is quite easy if you here they've updated a package you can tell urpmi to update the repository file list and do a search for the update. Or you can use Mandrake Update which checks to see if your list of updates is upto date then provides you with a GUI that has a list of all avaliable updates and a description/explanation of what they do or fix. You choose the packages you want to update and click update it'll then download the updates and any updated dependences for those packages. Thirdly you can simply use the command "urpmi --update --auto-select --auto" which will simply download and install all the current updates avaliable for your system with out prompting you for anything. The command of course can quite easily be set as a cron or at job to be done automatically every few days, hours what ever you prefer. Urpmi is also used to install new packages and there dependences simply choose the pacakges you want to install and urpmi will work out the dependences they need to run and the correct order in which they're to be installed. urpmi repositories are also used alot by the mandrake community with several groups or individuals runing there own ones with a variety of software that mandrake doesn't supply or newer versions of software that mandrake is currently testing or waiting for the next release before including it. All support dependency resolution and all can be added to urpmi's database of installable packages allowing them to be easily installed from within Mandrakes Software installation (rpmdrake/gurpmi) program or using urpmi at the command line. For example I've got several non mandrake urpmi sources/repositories set up (easy to do urpmi.addmedia name sourcepath) plf, texstar and several others. If I wanted to install mplayer (mandrake hasn't released a version for Mandrake 9.0) all i have to do is type " urpmi mplayer " as root (or select it in Software installer ) at the command line and urpmi will download the plf mplayer packages and dependences and install them in the correct order. If several different sources have the same package avaliable but different versions you can simply specify which source you want the packages from. Urpmi's a pretty neat tool it might not be quite as good as apt-get (which I've never used) but still it does whats needed. And I've yet to have it stuff up my dependencies (I've used it to install and set up kde3 in Mandrake 8.2 which came with kde 2.2)
