i'm begging the developers of mandrake to please implement 2 features that i'm sure the whole world will appreciate.

1) ADD A "SELECT EVERYTHING" OPTION TO YOUR PACKAGE SELECTION

2) ALLOW SAVING & LOADING YOUR SELECTION FROM SOURCES OTHER THAN A FLOPPY.

item 1 is obvious
item 2 is for those like myself who have a notebook without a floppy drive.

if there is a way of doing the above already, can you please email me at:
linuxguru@africamail.com

thanx

On request #1 - thats alot of software you wont need and alot of services you wont use - best do a minimum install and build up a custom system (i.e. install the default selection then find out what you want to use httpd, mysqld, dhcpd. etc etc)
How to do this and the answer to the package source question go to Software Manager (rpmdrake form the command line) or Update Software either through the mandrake control center or via the menu in KDE or Gnome desktop environment.
If you select software update you are usually asked to configure security update sources or in Software Manager you can configure a source via the application menu - I usually pick a local-ish FTP mirror site from the mandrake.com download page (make sure you give the full path to the RPM directory on the site e.g.
ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sunsite.../Mandrake/RPMS
for the UK mirror for mandrake 9.1)
you can also add cdroms (/mnt/cdrom/<path to RPMs on your cdrom disk>)
so now you have sources configured it may take some time to get listings depending on the connection you have (I recommend starting Software Manager from the cmd line as you can see what is going on in the console)
Now its a matter of selecting packages to install and uninstall.
hope this helps.

IMHO Feature #1 is very useful, specially when using Mandrake Update. It's easier to click a single Select All Updates, than selecting 10 or 20 separate updates one by one. Anyone that tries to install these days MDK 9.0 or 9.1 will agree that such an option would be welcome. I requested that option in the beta phase of 9.1 and I see that still is not included. Not good

And for the record, RedHat has that option on its RHN update program since 8.0.