SuSE Package Management

Rich Edelman redelman at speedscript.com
Thu Nov 18 11:37:38 CST 2004


On Thursday 18 November 2004 11:17 am, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
> On Thursday 18 November 2004 11:07 am, Dave Hull wrote:
> > Is it possible to run yast from the cli and have it update everything
> > available, the way one can with up2date -uf on Red Hat?
>
> Not as far as I know.  You have to step through the menu selection process.
> As I said, the documentation claims that you can specify a package on the
> command line, but doing so just takes you to the selection menu.

Sure it's possible. You can see it all graphically by running 'yast 
online_update', which launches the curses based online update module. 'yast2 
online_update' launches the QT based module, and 'online_update' is the real 
cli tool, it doesn't provide any output that I know of, but makes sure your 
system is up to date. 'online_update' is what SuSE runs as a cron job if you 
turn on the automatic updates feature.

Hell you can even set up apt4rpm on SuSE. SuSE doesn't have an apt repository 
but there are many well respected package managers in the SuSE community that 
have their own repositories (such as packman.links2linux.org).

SuSE offers the latest Gnome, KDE, and X.org packages in their supplementary 
tree on their FTP site. Also, check out ULB Gnome. 
http://www.usr-local-bin.org/linux.php is a great resource for Gnome on SuSE.

> > We've had very good results with Red Hat EL AS 3, but our subscriptions
> > are less than 60 days from expiration so we wanted to look at SLES before
> > we renewed our RH subscriptions.
> >
> > We're running a couple instances of Oracle DB and their Application
> > Server on a few Red Hat servers. But Novell and Oracle are now claiming
> > that SuSE is the fastest platform available for running Oracle, largely
> > due to SLES use of the 2.6 kernel that contains "significant" IO
> > enhancements.
>
> I'm surprised at how long it's taking RH and others to get the 2.6 kernel
> integrated into their distributions.

SuSE, Gentoo, and Mandrake have offered the 2.6 kernel for quite some time 
now. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe even Debian is 
offering the 2.6 kernel as an installation option.

> My clients could never afford RHEL subscriptions.  They were ok with the
> $60/year price, but when RH screwed us all they stuck with their 7.x
> installations.  I really wish I knew what to recommend to them.

What's wrong with the Fedora Legacy Project? You will have to install YUM, but 
that's really straightforward, and they seem to be providing timely updates. 
I use it on an old RH 7.3 box and an RH 8.0 box of mine.



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