I had installed openSUSE 10.2 on my primary desktop machine (which has a dual core 64 bit AMD processor) in December 2006, but there never seemed to be any updates available in the little Yast Online Update taskbar applet which is supposed to alert you to updates and security patches etc. I found this a little surprising but was always to busy to do anything about it. This post looks at how to configure the Yast Online Update applet, and also how I inadvertently managed to update from openSUSE 10.2 to Release Candidate 1 of openSUSE 10.3.
The applet icon looked like this:
Today I decided it was really time I got it working and get whatever security updates etc are outstanding. When you right click on the the icon there’s an option to configure it, so I did that and discovered there were no installation sources other than the original CD that I had installed as shown in the screenshot below.
I was a little surprised about this, because I know I’d configured some other sources at some point, at the very least a Packman reposuitory so I could get mp3 and dvd playback.
I clicked the “Add Service” button and got a screen like this one:
It was then just a matter of choosing a service from the openSUSE package repositories and entering them into the appropriate boxes. The resulting screen looked like this, with my new repository enabled. (Please note: do not try to copy the value I have in the screenshot; as you will see when you read on further I made a mistake with the repository that I chose).
I can’t rememeber if I had to do this step, but I did take a screenshot of it so perhaps I did, and that’s to then click the “Catalogs” tab and make sure the newly added repository’s catalog is checked, as shown in the screenshot below. The one I added was called “Factory”
Now that I actually had an update repository added, the Yast Online Update was able to be refreshed and changed to a little orange icon with an exclaimation mark:
I moved my mouse over the icon, and whew, there were a lot of updates to be done:
I got it to work running the updates. There were a few dependency issues so I needed to deselect some of the packages to update, notably OpenOffice.org, Yast, Zen Updater and the zypp command line tool and libraries. I didn’t realise at the time the reason for the issues with these, but soon did…
There was a kernel update so I had to reboot after all the packages had been downloaded and installed. It was a version jump, from 2.6.18 to 2.6.22 which surprised me because normally it would only be an update from eg 2.6.18.2 to 2.6.18.6.
I had a number of issues after my update with various software packages which I will cover in future posts, and it was only as I was sorting these out that I realised I had inadvertently upgrade from openSUSE 10.2 to release candidate 1 of openSUSE 10.3. No wonder a) there had been so many packages to update, and b) I had so many breakages. I spent a good deal of the afternoon sorting out some of the issues.
So the moral of the story is: be very careful when you select the repository to update from!
Update 28 September 2007: I just ran an update for the kernel to see if it would fix some other issues I was having, and after rebooting the YOU applet has gone and been replaced to the openSUSE updater. This seems to work better although when I click to install updates it doesn’t seem to think there’s a repository enabled, even though there has to be because it knows there are updates to install. Sigh… hopefully this is fixed in time for the final release of openSUSE 10.3.
The icons have changed to:
And this screenshot shows it in the taskbar system tray:
