i know that mandrakesoft gives out 3 iso's and one hidden one. i would like to know if downloading the tree would be a better choose. can i just download the tree and directly burn it to dvd. does it use md5sum?

The last time I downloaded the whole tree it made 7 CD's. There is a utility (MakeCD) which will make the iso's, I think it is in the misc directory.

So yes I believe you could put it on a DVD. Then you just edit urpmi sources to point to the DVD.

<edit> No there is no md5sum for the whole tree that I know of.

I just saw this link on another thread.

<edit> In that link they tell you to remove the contrib directory. I would not remove several gigabytes of files I just downloaded. Instead I would use the -x option in mkisofs to tell mkisofs not to include the contrib directory. Using their example it would look something like this:

mkisofs -J -R -v -T -o /path/to/target/Mandrake.iso -b /path/to/files/i586/isolinux/isolinux.bin -c /path/to/files/i586/isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 8 -boot-info-table -x /path/to/files/i586/contrib /path/to/files

Or just move the contrib directory so it is not part of the mandrake tree.