I decided to use my X-Mas vacation to finally upgrade my rather well running 10.1 installation to 10.2 and promptly ran into some odd problems. I haven't found a thread describing the things that I experienced, so maybe this will help someone running into the same oddities. Here we go:

I've booted the the installation DVD (which I bought BTW) and quite expectedly, after the usual hardware identification has completed, the installer complains about package conflicts it cannot resolve automagically. This was expected because I used guru and packman to give my 10.1 installation mp3 and DVD playback capabilities.

So I went and started to manually resolve the conflicts.

Oddity #1: Maybe it's more a gripe. I seem to remember that the conflict popups have been much more helpful in past releases. I kept getting stuff like "scheme opensuse 10.2 cannot be installed". Eh? I was getting this when I marked a package for deletion that the installer decided it really needs, but cannot remember why. Since it doesn't tell me what would be broken if I remove the specific package, my only solution was to go back and re-enable it.

Oddity #2: This was the real show stopper. One of the conflicts was - again expected - in packages like kaffeine. YAST offered me to

1. Ignore the conflict
2. Install anyway, despite an architecture change
3. Remove the package

Feeling brave I selected Option 2 and continued to remove conflicts. Big mistake. Sometime later I rechecked for conflicts. After a bit of thinking, Yast drops into text mode and tells me about an "Installation error".

After a couple of unsuccessful tries I searched LQ and found a thread stating that this error message is usually the result of defective installation media (remember: I bought mine). I did as I was told and checked my disc: no errors. Phew. But I still had my problem...

Back to try-and-error, I found that this architecture change is causing the erratic behavior of Yast. I then simply marked the offending packages for removal and later added them back again from the installation media.

From then on the installation went smoothly.

I got back mp3 and DVD playback with the help of the respective sticky thread (Thanks!!!) here at LQ and of course packman/guru.

Oddity #3: Maybe this is again more a gripe. During the installation and also later when installing/updating software via YAST, ZENworks tries to do it's thing, tells me not what it does and how progress is. Apparently it does this for every remote update source, since I have to hit the cancel button repeatedly until the window finally goes away. I decided to cancel the operation after waiting for maybe 15-20 minutes.

Anyone else with this kind of experiences?

Oh and BTW, I am pretty pleased now with my 10.2.

Harald

One of your repositories might be slow and it may be taking a while to read in the repo data. Installing via rug can take a while till it starts in any case. I had a struggle getting my video working but got it going.

That's what I suspected. At least I was able to cancel the whole thing and continue without problems. It would therefore be nice if the ZENworks dialog gives a bit information what it currently is doing. It would then be easy to identify the slow repository.

Harald

You could run "kdesu /sbin/YaST2 sw_single" to install or inspect software packages. There will be a dialog box come up when YaST contacts the repository. You will be able to tell if one of then takes an inordinate amount of time.

If you have plenty of hard drive space, you can keep the dvd image or cd images on your computer, or on a local shared drive and use it as the installation source. That will download packages from the source image much faster than from a disc.

Nice tip. Thanks!

Nevertheless, if ZENworks pops up a dialog informing me that it is doing something, why not "go the extra mile" and say what "it" is...

As I've said, I'm pretty happy now. Interesting things that I've found out:

1. Some process ran amok yesterday and gobbled up all my memory. I suspect it was superkaramba, which has probably caused the X server to continuously allocate memory. It was at 1.5GB in the end.
2. I've finally found a working solution for the extra keys (i.e. mp3 player control) of my keyboard: keytouch. lineak never did the trick for me, but keytouch is working absolutely fine.