One of my friends told me" you must pay the club fee or you can't obtain update of your mandrake linux"
must i pay the member fee or I can't update?
Is that true?

Your friend is wrong. Use urpmi (which is installed on your system), that updates your system.

This is a common ... well, I won't call it FUD, let's just call it a ... misunderstanding.

Joining the Club is recommended by Mandrakesoft, for obvious reasons. It is a reasonable way help support their continued existence, if you like Mandrake as a distro.

However, for those who don't want to join the Club, you just go to the Easy Urpmi site, follow the simple instructions there, and you end up configuring RPMdrake to access those repositories instead of (or in addition to) your installation CDs. Make sure you select mirrors for "contrib", "main", "updates", and "PLF". That way you get all programs and updates that Powerpack/Club members get, with the exception of the proprietary apps, and any other Club "Specials" there might be.

When you go to the Easy URPMI site, it asks you to select your system. If you are attempting to upgrade 10.1 CE to 10.1 Official, I am guessing that you select 10.1 Official, rather than the 10.1 CE that you are running? I am guessing that the next steps after that are to follow the instructions on the site, set up urpmi, and then do:

urpmi --update --auto-select

to perform the upgrade from 10.1 CE to 10.1 Official?

Has anyone done this successfully? Are there any danger points to be aware of, or is this a fairly safe thing to do?

Finally, do you have to be at run level 3 before doing this, or can you do it from an xterm in KDE?

I believe it would be safe to upgrade via urpmi from CE to OE, but I'm subject to correction from those who know better.

I do think it would be better to do an update that major at runlevel 3 to minimize the number of processes running at the time and avoid potential conflicts with files currently "in use."

As with anything that major, I'd try to have my home files backed up safely in a separate location beforehand. I've never done an upgrade yet that touched my home files, but as we know there's always the first time for every disaster!

I went from CE to OE that way, with no problems noted. Of course I hadn't done much system tweaking beforehand, or anything. So it was a pretty straightforward thing. After setting up with easyurpmi to point to the 10.1 Official mirrors, I just issued the command "urpmi --auto-select" (no --update). It would be *safest* to run from init level 3. (But IIRC, I ran from a Konsole windows in KDE.)

Of course, I always caveat that you must have things backed up, and be ready for a full install, just in case.

It would be handier to download the three 10.1 Official CD's, burn them off onto discs and use the installer to upgrade. If your system gets trashed badly, e.g. hard disk failure/corruption, and you need to reinstall from scratch it's faster to reinstall the system you want, than to install a previous version, and upgrade it over the internet.

I agree. That way, you'd have the three CD's on hand for whatever purpose you might need them for later.

If you do that, be sure to verify the MD5 checksum numbers for what you download, so you know you got a good image.

I also have always just used the Mandrake control center and updated all of my packages through rpmdrak... it always seems to work without having to mess around with easyurpmi (which is a good solution, unless your only high-speed connction is at work)