Use check boxes in the left-hand columns to flag the repositories

Enabled

Uncheck this box to temporarily disable the corresponding medium. The packages contained in this medium will not be available until you enable the medium again.

Updates

This box must be checked for update media, that is, media that contains updates of packages that are already in another medium, albeit with an older version number. Thus only selected update media are taken into account when looking for updates.

Action Buttons on the Right

Remove

Discard a medium which you no longer use. Simply select (highlight) the medium to be removed and click the Remove button.

Edit

Change the medium's parameters: the URL or the downloader (if you do not know what we are talking about, it is wise to leave this window via Cancel instead of Save changes).

If you need to pass through a specific proxy to access this particular medium, you can configure it here by clicking on Proxy.

Add

Add to your system all publicly available official package sources from Internet repositories. This is useful for example if you have a fast Internet connection or only have the first installation CD at hand. You should choose a mirror geographically near to your location.

After choosing a mirror and clicking Ok, package information for the source you have chosen is downloaded and all included packages will be available.

Up and Down arrows

These buttons allow you to change the order in which sources will be used when installing packages. By default, the newest version of a given package will always be installed, but if the same version is found on two different media, the one from the first medium in the list will be installed.

	Tip
	Therefore, it is better to move fastest media up...

Actions Available From the Menu

File → Update

You are shown a list of all enabled media; select the ones you want to update the list of available packages for, and click Update. This is useful for remote media to which new packages are being added. Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+U.

Options → Global options

Allows you to configure the program used to retrieve remote packages, whether the packages should be checked against a key and also to set the package information download policy (on-demand - the default, always, update-only, or never - useful for slow network connections or if you are charged per bytes transferred). These choices affect all package sources. Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+G.

Options → Add a custom medium

Choose this to open a new dialog, in which you define all required parameters for a new software package medium. Please bear in mind that the parameters, and available options, depend on the type of medium being defined. Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+A.

Options → Manage keys

It is important that any package you install is authenticated. To do so, each package can be electronically signed with a “key”, and you can allow/disallow keys on a per-medium basis. On Figure 7.8, “Package Repository Authentication Key Management”, you can see that the Mandriva Linux key is allowed for medium “Main”. Click on Add to allow another key for the selected medium (beware, do this with care, as with all security-related questions), and on Remove to remove a key from the selected medium. Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+K.

Options → Parallel

If you are running a large network of computers, you may want to install a package on all the computers in parallel; choosing this menu opens a dialog window allowing the configuration of the “Parallel” mode. As it is rather complicated and only useful to a limited group of people, this short introduction will not give further details about it. Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+P.

Options → Proxy

If you are blocked by a firewall and you still need to access remote media (especially for package updates), you can do so if you have a proxy server which leads to the Internet (at least in an area where you can find a package server). Normally it should be enough to fill in the Proxy hostname to get it working (see Figure 7.9, “Specifying a Proxy for Remote Media”). If you need a user / password combination to get through the proxy, you can also specify these here. Just confirm your changes by clicking on OK and you are done. Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+R.