would anyone be able to help?

Anyone at all?

If you dont want to spend a long time downloading updates because of a slower connection then there's not a lot we can do about it.

Try asking a mate/school with a faster connection to let you download the apps from the mirrors and then use urpmi to install them from the command line.

Proud,

But how would I add my CD as a source list if the software is already available on the CDs I have?

From man urpmi.addmedia
The syntax is :urpmi.addmedia name removable://path with relative_path_to_hdlist.hz

Any problems just ask.

Proud,

Thank you. If I run the command "urpmi.addmedia name removable://path with relative_path_to_hdlist.hz" and as well as urpmi.addmedia --updates update will it overwrite the former so simply append to the sourcelist? Also assuming I wish to add new software e.g. urpmi ssh how does it loop through the list i.e. will it ask for the CD first? What happens if I wish to download the latest version off the web rather than the CD?

Sources are only removed by the urpmi.removemedia command, again it's all in the man pages for the different commands. I believe it would select the latest version of an app but you can disable a source if you do not wish it to be considered when querying the system.

With regards to a work arround on the dial up connection, I guess you can download the rpms to your hard drive through a download manager program to your hard drive then install from there.

You will need a list of rpms to copy first. You can try here: http://www.mandrakesoft.com/security...ories?dis=10.0 for Mandrake 10 updates. Then try going to http://rpm.phone.net and search for the rpms there.

Be sure to check the md5sum after downloading and run a --sig (or something like that) to check the signature of the rpm before installing them.

This should make installing updates a little bearable as you can pause the download and resume when you feel like it. The downside is that this is a rather long wait especially if you are going to copy an update with 10 rpms with filesizes ranging from 60kb to 40MB. But is still better than letting urpmi to copy them from the internet. At the moment this is the only way I can think of to make installing updates using a dial up connection bearable.

I just start using urpmi and I found that when I
urpmi <packagename> , it will request so many dependencies nearly 400Mb
and seems if I urpmi any package names, it appears the same list of dependebies (~400Mb)
and I found most of them not really related to the <packagename>