Mageia forum

I think a great time saver would be a task-tainted and/or a task-nonfree that would help getting all those programs, codecs and plug ins that a lot of people like/need, for instance dvdcss, mp3, h.264, java, flash and win32/64 plugin support as well as all of the gstreamer plugins including bad and ugly. it would be great to just click on one or two task- in urpmi or install software over installing all of it individually. what a time saver that would be. plus setting up a system for a new user would be cut in half with a task- for these kind of apps and plugins.

If you enable the tainted repositories and run an update, the untainted media players will be replaced by the tainted ones fetching all needed codecs as dependencies.
The only thing you have to install manually is libdvdcss2 which is only needed if you want to play commercial DVDs. What sense would there be in a task package to install everything in those repos?
Not all people want to have flash, java-sun (there is openjdk in the normal repos) and I don't see a great time saver by installing many unwanted packages using a task, It's a one time thing and needs only a few minutes at the worst.

Oliver

ok, when I enabled the tainted repositories and went back to "install programs" and looked under "all updates" the list was empty. this was after a refresh. maybe I did something wrong. or maybe it doesn't work under the 64 bit version of mageia, IDK. If this works as you say then I must be doing something wrong, I will grab an old HD and do a clean install and follow what you explained. I will be very relived if that is all I have to do rather than search and dl everything I want to install from the tainted and nonfree repositories.

Before you do a clean install you may try to run

Code: Select all

urpmi --auto-update

as root. My guess is, that the update tool only looks for new packages in repositories where both the "enabled" and "updates" column has a tick in "media manager" (in my installation only the update repositories have them both). The above command on the contrary checks every enabled repository for newer packages.

I move between the gui and the console without any trouble, the urpmi console commands are so clean and simple. about 50% of the time I will drop down yakuake and just do this when all else fails. if Using auto-update does the trick that would be great.

I think a great time saver would be a task-tainted and/or a task-nonfree that would help getting all those programs, codecs and plug ins that a lot of people like/need

I think that's a good idea in the end.
Something like Task-Multimedia. Obviously not installing everything under the sun from tainted, but the minimal packages needed to be able to watch a movie and listen music (local or radio streams).
Not everyone knows what needs to be installed in order to do that.
It would be also useful if for some reason you have un-installed some of those packages.

New package requests can be made through:
https://bugs.mageia.org/enter_bug.cgi?p ... mat=guided

Today someone asked me to take a look at the Ubuntu derivative iGolaware.
Not that much to tell about the distribution so far, except for the installation-process, which was very user-friendly.
Nicely was integrated the possibility for downloading the nonfree/tainted packages.
As pictures say more than words:

I've already proposed such a task-multimedia package, a template is also in the wiki:
http://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=task-multimedia

It's just that it did not receive much attention:
https://www.mageia.org/pipermail/mageia ... hread.html

you see, that is really a shame, It is a great idea and a lot of different distro's are doing it. I think that adding something like this to mageia would expand it's appeal to not only newbies but also for people that just want to have everything working at first boot without a bunch of trouble. ignoring it or dismissing it's value is really a shame for a distro that prides itself on ease of use.

Very well said.