[plug] urpmi

[J Michael Gilks]

>
> I tried unsuccessfully to add mirror.pacific.net.au's 10.0/Official but
> could not figure out how to specify the hdlist.
>
A neat trick I picked up on the Mandrake forums is

urpmi.addmedia --distrib 
http://mirror.pacific.net.au/linux/Mandrakelinux/devel/10.1/i586

This will give you a set of sources for Main1, Contrib1 and jpackage1 with no 
further input from you.
Use the Media Manager in the Software Management tab of the Control Centre to 
add an updates source
http://mirror.pacific.net.au/linux/Mandrakelinux/official/updates/10.1/main_updates
and also the PLF stuff
http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/plf/mandrake/free/10.1

This sort of choice is what is nice about Linux.
The first command is command line and works great taking a lot of guesswork 
and hassle out of finding hdlist files, which have been known to change 
location.
The rest is using the Control Centre GUI. Click Add in Media Manger, choose 
the server type, paste the address and it does its stuff.
I always do updates from the command line and install from the gui.
A mixture of command line and gui to do the job and keep me comfortable.

After these sources are configured all packages appear in the one list.
I also had some intermittent problems with pacific.net.au last month, but keep 
hammering at the site and eventually it comes good.
I also on occasion rail against Mandrake, every release seems to include some 
'feature' to piss me off. However, that said, enough old 'features' are fixed 
beyond my wildest dreams that I always come back.

While struggling to maintain other distros I tend to have dreams of Control 
Centre from which I do not want to wake.

Love
Mike.