Firefox install - urpmi vs web download

[Seren]

I've been told that the most common method of installing software on Mandrake is via the urpmi tool.

Aside from the fact that the download is somewhat larger (22mb vs 9mb from the website - I'm guessing it's the dependencies?). My biggest grips with it is that I'd usually like to backup the software that I use, and using urpmi doesn't seem to allow me to do that.

Actually, it does. The --noclean option in the urpmi command line will make sure that urpmi doesn't delete RPMs after installing them. They show up in the /var/cache/urpmi/rpms directory. (Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to prevent the Mandrake Control Center from deleting RPMs that it installs.)

So my question are as follows:
1) For those that download firefox from their website, how did you get it to register with the rpm manager so that it could be uninstalled via the gui?

I don't think you can, but I recall that the uninstall, per Firefox's documentation, is really simple. All you do is delete the directory that you installed it into. (And any links to it in your toolbar and graphical environment menus.)

2) For those that downloaded firefox via urpmi. Are anyway to access what it downloaded for backup purposes?

See my first comment above.

[Seren]

Hi,
asking linuxa's qn. again.. anyway to save the updates downloaded using urpmi, so that i can burn them to a cd and give it to my friend? He has only dialup... are they automatically deleted after installation?

Yes, if you don't use the --noclean switch.


I also only have dialup, so I make sure to save each update RPM that I download. Also it speeds reinstallation of Mandrake to have all those trillions of updates, including the kernel files.