Thought I'd share this with you.

I've had a problem for about a week with the YaST package manager (Software > Software Management). It would start and just hang for about a minute and then come back with the error:

"Another process is accessing the database. Package management cannot be used now."

Tried lots of things to find out what was going on, including stopping the zmd and onesuseupdater daemons. I look in the tutorials and articles, on the Suse/Novell website, and on suseforums.net with no luck.

Eventually I decided that something in the package database was corrupted after a tip on suseforums.net I renamed the /var/lib/zypp/cache directory to /var/lib/zypp/cache-old, restart the package manager and it worked. Still slow, but working.

Along the way I found another useful trick. In the Installation Sources page I have all the repos set Off in the refresh column. That now starts up straight away without trying to refresh the database.

I've been giving SMART package manager a go during this problem period, and so far it looks good.