[TriLUG] Any opinions about MandrakeOnline?

[Michael Hrivnak]

I too am fond of Mandrake, and I subscribe to the Mandrake Club for $60/year.  
It gets me earlier access to newly released isos, and some other cool stuff.

As for updates, I don't like Mandrake Online.  For one thing, do you want them 
to automatically be updating your systems?  As much as I like them, I don't 
trust the update process to go completely smoothly every time with no 
interuption of service.

I subscribe to their "announcements" mailing list which informs me every time 
there's an update.  Then it's a simple matter of:

urpmi.update -f update_source
urpmi --update --auto-select

If you really want it automated, you could run a cron job with an extra flag 
or two for urpmi to tell it to do things without input.

Now, I'm really not familiar with how ManrakeOnline works, and perhaps it's 
easier, simpler or somehow more efficient.  But, in my experience, it's not 
too critical.

Michael

On Monday 03 May 2004 02:31 pm, Jon Carnes wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-05-03 at 13:51, Magnus Hedemark wrote:
> > On 3 May 2004, Jon Carnes wrote:
> > > Anyone using MandrakeOnline to keep their systems up-to-date? Any
> > > opinions good or bad?
> > >
> > > I brought up a new server on our network using Mandrake 10. It offers a
> > > RHN type service for ~$21/year/system. If it's as good as RHN then
> > > that's a deal.
> >
> > Jon, as an alternative, yum is free.  It scales well, and can let you
> > apply different package groups to different servers based on group
> > membership and an XML file that follows the same DTD as comps.xml from
> > the install discs.
> >
> > This doesn't really answer your question, but hopefully gives you some
> > free alternatives to solve your problem.
>
> Yep, yum is great.
>
> I like the idea of MandrakeOnline as it lets me give Mandrake some money
> and receive additional value (I can justify giving Mandrake money). I
> was just wondering if it really works or if I should follow a different
> path for updating my systems (like yum!).
>
> Jon