Migrate From Debian or Fedora based distros to Mageia or Mandriva

If you want to migrate from any other Linux distribution to Mageia or Mandriva, you need to know that the package manager is urpm*.

In this article I will show you the most popular urpm commands and their equivalents on Fedora and Debian Based distros. I saw that Mageia is very popular on distrowatch, but the community articles / documentation is very poor. The are lucky to have the Mandriva blogs/forums/community.

To install packages, use: urpmi <package-name>

# urmpi vim

Or, you can alias it to install:

# alias install='urpmi'

Now, to install vim, use:

# install vim

Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint equivalent: apt-get install <package-name>

Fedora equivalent: yum install <package-name>

To uninstall packages (with dependencies), use urpme <package-name>

# urmpe vim

Or, you can alias it to uninstall:

# alias uninstall='urpme'

Now, to uninstall vim, use:

# uninstall vim

Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint equivalent: apt-get remove <package-name>

Fedora equivalent: yum remove <package-name>

To query the package database (see if a package is installed or not) use: urmpq <package-name>

# urpmq vim

Or, you can alias it to query:

# alias query='urpmq'

Now, to query vim, use:

# query vim

Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint equivalent: dpkg -s <package-name>

Fedora equivalent: rpm -qa | grep  <package-name>

To find package that contains a file, use : urpmf <file-name>

# urpmf .vimrc

Or, you can alias it to contains:

# alias contains='urpmf'

Now, to find which package contains the file .vimrc, by using the alias:

# contains .vimrc

Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint equivalent: apt-file search <file-name>

Fedora equivalent: yum whatprovides <file-name>

Find package by a part of the name: urpmq –fuzzy <part-of-package_name>

# urpmq --fuzzy vim


Or, you can alias it to search:

# alias search='urpmq --fuzzy'

Now, to find a package by its partial name, with the alias use:

# search vim

Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint equivalent: apt-cache search <package-name>

Fedora equivalent: yum search<package-name>

To update the local repositories, use: urpmi.update -a

Or, alias it to update:

# alias update='urmpi.update -a'

Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint equivalent: apt-get update

Fedora equivalent: yum update

To update the system, use: urpmi –auto-select

Or, alias it to upgrade:

# alias upgrade='urpmi --auto-select'

Debian / Ubuntu / Linux Mint equivalent: apt-get dist-upgrade

Now, to update the repos or upgrade the system by using the aliases, use:

# upgrade