Adding Older Versions of Magia to Your Repos

The Mageia Wiki for URPMI contains useful information in the section titled Copying CD or a DVD to a home directory and using the copy in urpmi.

Before starting, download the appropriate Magia DVD. Since we are not using the kernel or any system files from these earlier distros, it's not necessary to also obtain all the updates. Here are the download links for Mageia7 x86_64/ i586 and Mageia8 x86_x64/i586.

Method #1 - Mageia Wiki Method

First, make directories for each release and each architecture you will be using directory somewhere convenient. Mageia suggests placing them under /home/uid/repo/. Then, copy the x86_64/media and/or i586/media directories from the DVD there.

For each directory, you will need to create the hdlist that urpmi requires, change to that directory and run:

$ sudo genhdlist2

Then add the media you just installed with:

$ sudo urpmi.addmedia --distrib NameOfMedia file://home/uid/repo

Now, it's as simple as using urpmi to install the desired package.

Method #2 - urpmi-proxy

Install and configure urpmi-proxy as discussed here and at the Mageia Wiki.

On our Mageia9 system, we can access one of the features of urpmi-proxy whereby we can have many different media. We'll use this approach, rather than creating a local repo media so it will be available

to all machine son the network and we won't need to waste disk space storing packages we won't need.

To add a Mageia 8 repo:

Edit the /etc/urpmi-proxy.conf file to specify a Mageia 9 mirror, a Mageia 8 mirror and a Mageia 7 mirror. But wait! There are no Mageia 7 mirrors available (but see below -- FOUND!). That means we will need to download the Mageia 7 DVD and establish a local mirror on our urpmi-proxy server.

https://distro.ibiblio.org/mageia/distrib/8/i586 (or) x86_64

https://distro.ibiblio.org/Mageia-archive/distrib/7.1/i586 (or) x86_64

Copy the Mageia 7 DVD to the server and mount it. Create the directories on the server and copy the rpm files to them. Run genhdlist2 to create the index.

$ sudo genhdlist2 --allow-empty-media --no-bad-rpm --xml-info --clean /var/lib/urpmi-proxy/repository/distrib/8/x86_64/media/extra/release/

Now to add that repo to our local machine.

Method #3 Adding a DVD Medium

There have been several packages that have been obsoleted and dropped from Mageia9 that may be useful and it would also be useful to use URPMI to install them. Since many mirrors drop older versions of Mageia and thus web-accessible repos are unavailable. it is convenient to use the DVD ISO images to accomplish this. As an example, we'll use Mageia-7-x86_64.iso. It's no longer available from the official Mageia repos, so it can be downloaded here.

$ sudo mkdir /media/mageia7

$ sudo mount -o loop <path/to/DVD>/Mageia-7-x86_64.iso

To add the DVD to rpmdrake.

$ sudo urpmi.addmedia --distrib Mageia7 /media/mageia7/x86_64

To mount the ISO image every time automatically, modify /etc/fstab to add the following

## automount the Mageia7 DVD

/path/to/file.iso /path/to/folder iso9660 loop 0 0

If hard disk space is at a premium, the files can be extracted from the DVD or DVD image and made into an ISO image of smaller size.

RESOURCES

You can find all the old, obsoleted versions of the DVDs archived here.

You can find all the RPM repos for the old, obsoleted versions archived here.

Mageia Forum question about Older Release Repos

Mageia Wiki - Alternate Ways to Install Programs

Mageia Wiki - How to do your own backports

Mageia Wiki - Packagers RPM tutorial

Mageia Forum - HOWTO Build a SRC.RPM

Mageia Wiki - URPMI.ADDMEDIA