Skip to main content

Adding Older Versions of Mageia 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

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

Create iso image from folder via terminal commands



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

DOS4GW.EXE Version 2.01a and Alternative DOS Extenders

DOS4GW.EXE The Tenberry DOS extender DOS4GW.EXE was used by many early DOS games. I still enjoy playing many of these games and DOS4GW.EXE is usable with DOSBox , so they can be played on Linux. However, the version of DOS4GW.EXE that was included with the game was whatever was current at the time. The most recent version that includes many bugfixes that possibly affected the games when used with DOSBox have been fixed in the latest version, 2.01a. It's not free at US$49, but you can downloaded it here . Simply substitute it for whatever version of DOS4GW.EXE your game provided and enjoy the bug-fixed goodness. Tenberry also makes a "high-performance" "pro" version of DOS4GW.EXE, but it costs $300. I think that they could sell quite a few of these to hobby users (since, you know, DOS is dead) for US$5. Open Souce to the Rescue There are better performing, free and Open Source alternatives available and worth a look. DPMI Explained Let's unders...

Return to Castle Wolfenstein for Modern Linux

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a first-person shooter originally released on November 19, 2001. The game, like many other classic games, is available at GOG.com and costs only US$5.99. iortcw for Linux Don't bother with old and crusty Linux binaries offered by idsoft; they are problematic and it's painful to use them on a modern Linux. Fortunately for us, there are more modern GPL-licensed Linux binaries available for 32- and 64-bit systems as well as high resolution textures packages. The project at GitHub provides source code that can also be compiled for MS Windows using MinGW. iortcw for Windows and Mac You can download pre-compiled binaries for 32- and 64-bit Linux, MS Windows and Mac from here . Let's put our files in /usr/local/games/rtcw . As root, extract the downloaded .ZIP file for your architecture to  /usr/local/games/rtcw . All we are missing are the game data files. I purchased them from GOG.com. The game installer downloaded from GOG.com can be ...

Unpack those .EXE game files from GOG.com (Plus other un-packers)

I just came upon innoextract today. I have many of the wonderful games from GOG.com, some of which have native Linux Clients. Before now, I've had to use PlayOnLinux or Crossover to install these for use with WINE, then add the Linux client. InnoSetup as a way to create an installer to install the games on Windows.  Daniel Scharrer has created innoextract to allow the unpacking of those archives on a non-Windows platform. The website provides information on using innoextract , but this information from the page is very useful: GOG.com Installers GOG.com installers with a 2.x.x version number on the download page or in the filename use InnoSetup 5.5.0 and cannot be extracted by innoextract 1.2 and older. Older installers use InnoSetup 5.2.3 and usually have no version in the filename. Some GOG.com multi-part installers with version 2.1.x or higher use RAR archives (renamed to .bin) to store the game data. These files are not part of the InnoSetup installer and require...