If I understand correctly the remastered version has all the patches up to October 13, but when I go to Yast onine updater there's probably at least 200 patches totaling around 2.1 GB. I know there haven't been that many patches in a little over two weeks, and most of them have the same version number as what is already installed. I know they are trying to shift away from Yast toward the Zen updater, so should I just ignore Yast altogether and go by the available patches in Zen? All this package manager craziness is making me not enjoy SuSE anymore, and I really like everything else. Thanks in advance

Scott

Just proceed with YaST update as it would download only new packages even though, for some strange reason (read it Novell Zen updater), YaST would show all applicable and non-applicable patches found in your preferred update repository.

I would also suggest removing zen and rug package managers and doing updates only through YaST, YUM or SMART managers.