Matt555 said:
I dont understand...could you explain please?
Sure.
urpmi is the Mandriva tool for automatically installing & updating software. It's a powerful tool -- in fact, it can even be used to upgrade the entire system to the latest version, if you should desire to do so. Imagine being able to upgrade WIndowsXP to Vista without a single reboot -- this is basically the equivilent of what you can do with urpmi. A
repository is a public store of software. Urpmi, when used with repositories, can provide you with a list of software that you can install based on what's available in that particular repository. In Mandriva Linux, there are several different types of repositories:
- Main -- provides everything found on the Mandriva DVD/CDs
- Updates -- Any updated/patched software found in the main mirror is released through the updates repository. Using this source, you can easily keep your Mandriva Linux system up to date.
- Contrib -- Contributed packages for Mandriva Linux. Lots and lots of software available in the contib mirrors, highly recommended
- PLF-Free -- PLF, as in "Penguin Liberation Front". PLF-Free packages are those that were not included in the official mirrors for various legal or political reasons, but are usually not proprietary packages. A good example of a program found in a PLF-Free mirror would be ZSNES, an open-source SNES emulator. Technically legal, and the software's even open source. But Mandriva isn't looking for a lawsuit from Nintendo.
- PLF-NonFree -- Same as above, but proprietary packages. An example would be the Win32-Codecs package, which includes all of the multimedia codecs found in Windows, such as WMV9. It's a "free" package, but is covered by patents and trademark, so it's in a legal gray-area in many countries.
If you add all of these repositories, you'll have a *huge* amount of software to choose from. You can learn more about urpmi and set up your urpmi-repositories using
urpmi-addmedia.org. I probably made it sound more difficult than it is, you'll see what I mean. If you need any specific help, feel free to start a thread in the Linux forum.
All the best,
-AT
P.S. - Oops, forgot to mention what cooker was! Cooker is the name Mandriva uses for the packages which are still under development, i.e. not yet well tested. It contains the absolute latest packages available for Mandriva Linux. The cooker has its own main, contrib and PLF mirrors as well, and uses the same basic principles. Unless you want to test out the absolute bleeding-edge-latest of Mandriva software, you would normally avoid using cooker sources and instead use whichever source matches the version you have installed (e.g. 2005LE). Right now, the cooker mirrors contain all the latest packages for the forthcoming 2006 release. If you are running the latest release candidate, you should use the cooker mirrors.
