Cooker is the Mandrivalinux development distribution. It evolves constantly, thus being called an "unstable distribution", and is regulary forked to produce a stable distribution for release. Think of it as yet another version of Mandrivalinux that is not meant for everyday use. See the Mandrivalinux cooker page for more details.
The Mandrivalinux distribution has two different packages sections, main and contribs. Main constitutes the download edition, while only a part of contrib is present on CD, even for boxed editions. The whole content of contrib is only available from mirrors (see Mandrivalinux mirrors list).
RTFM you have to, young padawan. The world wide documentation reference for urpmi is on Urpmi.org. And once you figured out how it works, use easyurpmi for configuring it properly.
As PLF rebuild of official Mandriva packages have exactly the same
version and release number, urpmi will always to upgrade the official
package with the PLF rebuild if available, due to lexical ordering of
the release flag (plf instead of mdk). If you consider this as a
problem, juste use a regexp in /etc/urpmi/skip.list this
way: /mplayer.*mdk/.
Well, you need to understand our release cycle first. As with Mandrivalinux, all new packages are introduced for cooker exclusively. However, contrary to Mandrivalinux, we have dedicated maintainers who try to backport those packages for older distributions if possible. This means that only cooker is ensured to be up-to-date; other distributions are less and less likely to remain up-to-date time goes on.
The same holds true for exotic archs such as ppc or alpha since i586 is the default architecture.
Older Mandrivalinux distributions are not maintained (except for security reasons), meaning that any new package introduced after the release won't be available for that distribution. Since we always favor inclusion in official contribs whenever possible, we often have PLF packages with dependencies on official packages. This can cause trouble when backporting to a distribution where those packages don't exist. We also backport the official package in this case and provide them on our own mirrors, but with the standard .mdk extension.
For instance, the libmad package was introduced in contribs after the 8.2 release, and thus it isn't available for 8.2 on Mandriva mirrors. It is available, however, on PLF mirrors for 8.2 and prior branches only. For later distributions, it is available on Mandriva mirrors only.
See Why are some .mdk packages there?.
First, make sure you've understood what's at stake and the reasons that have lead us to create the PLF project (see about for details). Since the world would be better without these reasons, consider what you can do to help. The following links can be useful:
Second, if you have available disk space and bandwidth, we are always looking for additional mirrors (see mirrors for details).
Third, if you have some experience with packaging, or are willing to learn, just join the mob (see howto for details).
Sure. Everything producted by PLF, be it logo, packages, etc..., is covered by the PLF license. It says that you're free to use it any way you want, but if you intend to do some kind of benefit with it, all of these benefits would have to be given to some kind of free software organisation, and more specifically organisations that cares bout digital freedoms, such as EFF or eucd.info, as they precisely adress the reason why PLF exist: software patents, privacy enfringment laws, etc...
Short answer, no.
Long answer, yes, we can provide you hosting if you want to setup a PLF branch for your distribution. We have ftp mirrors, a webserver, a cvs server, and shell access to build hosts, on all branches. But we will not do the work for you on a distribution we do not use.
By the past, we have done some try, but we didn't really understood all documentation of the script used to do the cd. We may try to do it once again. All help are welcome, of course.
Yes of course. We all carries big weapons, and think the violence is the best solution. That's why we are only making packages, because doing packages is a violent action toward the society. We are also know to hit random people in the street without reason.
I guess that one of the problem of our modern society is that people show more importance to appareance than to reality. Showing a pingouin with a gun cannot convince someone by itself. Thing would be different if we had a whole section of text dedicated to show that violence is good, but, for now, this is not the case.
So saying that we promote violence is a nonsense. People taking the time to talk with us or getting past the logo already know that.