This page is intended to track all tasks necessary to keep up-to-date with cooker without any risk ;-)
Links
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=mandrake-cooker&r=1&w=2 Mandrake cooker mailing list archive
http://mandrake.contactel.cz/people/svetljo/mandrake/kernel/RPMS/ list of RPMS from svetljo (mostly kernel)
http://home.skycon.net/~junfan/cookermirrors.php http://cookermirrors.skycon.net/ cooker mirrors (latest updates)
http://www.acert.pt/~fribeiro/mirrorwatch/ freshness of mirrors
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/Mandrakelinux101 latest planning for Mandrake 10.1 20040726 "new versions freeze"
http://linuxfr.org/forums/10/1918.html take care of your Mandrake cooker ;-)
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/CookerWeeklyNews information twice a month (with
archives)
Testing beta
Here are some preliminary advices
- compulsory : on a dedicated partition, install a new version of Mandrake
- keep a stable version for mails, internet connection, working environment... just a "Rescue CD boot" away in the worst case ;-) (You can use MandrakeMove? to get access to your Linux Partitions)
- this is a crash test environment, so you're free to scratch it : do not store any information of value to you or copy it as soon as possible to your stable environment, you would (will) risk to lose it otherwise
- some examples (normal when testing a "bleeding edge" version) :
- I crashed an ext2 partition that I had to reformat when installing Mandrakelinux 9.2 beta1
- could not boot in windoze any more due to a bug in microsoft partitions (badly declared) : Mandrakesoft published a way to correct using drakxtools (erase first 1000 bytes on the partition, or declare it - out of standard / expected - following microsoft way to do it :-( )
- I crashed the cooker partition when testing cooker just after Mandrake 10 Official - had to reinstall cooker 30 mn + 1 h download / upgrade to cooker (my ADSL is 1024 kb/s / 128 kb/s)
- I crashed it again when trying to remove bootsplash (bad idea), had to use Ice WM to get back to Gnome...
- I always could go back to my stable version (using a rescue CD at worst to restore a working lilo.conf / MBR) : that's production versus preproduction
Upgrading partially Official to cooker
- cooker packages are not thoroughly validated (that's the purpose of installing it : for tests) and may cause harm to your environment without easy "undo" or revert to stable feature : that's the way I lost galeon for 3 weeks, rpm -e galeon in order to revert to previous version would have required me to uninstall Gnome, evolution, ... I discovered Mozilla in the meantime ;-)
- only urpmi packages you want to test and check dependancies it wants to install : never accept when it requires upgrading libraries or Gnome & KDE... (a single "ordinary" package should not require it), otherwise switch to Testing Beta ;-) that's for your own safety
- backup vital data : bookmarks, mails, documents... you're going to lose some data playing this game ;-)
- an example with perl from cooker on 10.1 bad idea
Managing sources & upgrades
- longer description
- easyurpmi is your friend : select both stable and cooker and launch upgrade depending of which packages you want to keep up-to-date (after specifying which sources are active) => identify clearly stable_ and cooker_ (with a prefix) sources so that you can select the appropriate active source
- in Software Media Management, choose cooker_sources (they will take precedence on any other) then in a terminal window as root :
- urpmi.update -a to get latest updates
- urpmi [package] to install the selected package from cooker
- urpmi kernel-2 to select which new kernel to add beware do urpmi kernel-source as well, and take into account the fact that lilo will be run automatically, so be sure your /etc/lilo.conf is up-to-date
- unselect cooker_ sources :
- urpmi.update -a to get latest hdlist updates (may not be necessary as done before)
- urpmi --auto-select to apply them