Eric D. Schabell: Opensuse 10.1 upgrade woes, SMART to the rescue!

Monday, June 12, 2006

Opensuse 10.1 upgrade woes, SMART to the rescue!

This last week I spent some time updating my AMD64 box from Opensuse 10.0 to 10.1. All seemed to go smoothly until one tries to use the package manager…

First off you expect to use YOU and YAST, the eternal SUSE tools that have always worked exceptionally well for me in the past. I was rather surprised to find that there was something called Zen on my machine and an .EXE file running in my process list! It seems that Opensuse 10.1 is in a transition to a new package manager and update system based on MONO code, for more details please see these sites for their detailed explanations: Desktoplinux, SuseDiary.

The only problem with these explanations is that for me they do not work. The YAST package manager seems to be partially working as if some components are no longer available or supported? The YOU updater is just gone. The Zen updater and Rug package manager are running but seem to have problems finishing any sort of update whether run by a user with superuser privileges or root itself. Rather a problem for me.

I did some research last night and stumbled on a new solution called Smart which seems to take care of all the problems everyone has been having. I spent some time reading about it and followed the great installation guide at Dev-Loki and I am once again updating my Opensuse 10.1 box without any problems. For this I am really grateful, as in the meantime I had almost abandoned Opensuse for some other distro. Thanks to the authors for saving my Opensuse box! ;-)