I've just installed 10.1 on a new system. Everything has been ok so far, but I need to get my head wrapped around the new update scheme. From what I've read, there are two ways to run updates in 10.1: the old way thru YOU, or the new way thru Zen (please correct me if I'm wrong). I've have some questions though, that hopefully someone can answer for me.

* Are YOU and Zen independent of each other? In other words, do they have different package databases (I hope not, this would be dangerous and a mess), or do they share the same package database (I hope so!)?

* For the moment I going to assume (I know, not a good thing) that they share the same database. If I update a package with YOU, does Zen see that and sync up? In other words, do they syncronize?

* So far I've updated thru both YOU, and Zen. I've noticed with YOU that the package list does not clear itself. What I mean is after I've done an update and then re-open YOU, it's still listing the same packages that I thought I've updated. How do I clear this list?

Thanks in advance for your comments and advice.

YOU and Zen share update servers, at least they do on my system and will sync after the other updates packages.
YOU will list all available updates from the factory release, even after you install them (though they are shown as installed). I'm not aware that you can remove them from the list other than by removing the update servers in YaST.

Well that's confusing. When you review you list in YOU, how do you know what you've updated and what you have to update? So that's one advantage Zen has over YOU: it removes a package from the update list once you've installed it.

Ok, well at least it seems both methods are working on my system... for now.

Thanks again.

- only common lib is libzypp. For example I deleted all zmd/mono/rug (with exception of single libzypp) and I am using Yast/smart only
- rpm db is common to all package managers otherwise eat time you would use different PM different installed/not installed packages would be shown

see above


not clear:
Yast:
not installed packages: unchecked box
installed packages checked box
upgreadable installed packages package marked blue
higher version of installed package that in default base marked red

This is pretty clear and useful. You would have to familiarize yourself better with Yast to understand all the advantages and power of Yast (way better than zen or smart)

Basically YOU has been replaced (for the most part) with Zen.

However, Zen is seriously broken. Or rather, it never quite worked as expected and shouldn't have been released.

I'd STRONGLY suggest moving over to smart and removing the novell-zmd from your system. For a like me, SMART works great!

Here's a wiki on it: http://susewiki.org/index.php?title=Smart

Tweakhound has an excellent article: http://www.tweakhound.com/linux/suse...stalling_1.htm

You want to get the SMART packages from here (they've got suse repo's already built in)

http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/rpm-...=/System/smart

I'm currently (as of this post) using 0.42 release 9. Get these RPM files:

• smart-0.42-12.guru.suse101.i686.rpm
• smart-0.42-12.guru.suse101.i686.rpm
• smart-0.42-12.guru.suse101.i686.rpm
• smart-addons-0.42-12.guru.suse101.i686.rpm
• smart-gui-0.42-12.guru.suse101.i686.rpm
• smart-ksmarttray-0.42-12.guru.suse101.i686.rpm

Be sure and install python and elemntree first.

• python-xml
• python-elementtree
• rpm-python

Hope that helps!

I understand the nomenclature, but it's different than previous versions of YOU; or at least the version in 9.3 where once you did an update this list was clear. So if there were no updates, there was no list. Do you understand what I mean? It's kind of confusing to open YOU and look and see this huge list when there's no update available, don't you think?

I don't think Zen is seriously broken. The first thing I did when I installed 10.1 was to do an update like was suggested on openSuse.org. For the most part I don't see any major issues with it. Sure I hit a few bumps here and there, but nothing to scream at.

I'm not going to jump ship just yet. I liked YOU, and I think for the most part Zen can be just as good as YOU if given a chance.

It appears to me that the biggest difficulty with Zen is that it hogs system resources at unpredictable times, rendering machine useless for other tasks for many minutes at a time. The "update-status" process in particular uses over 90% CPU and over 60% Memory once it gets into its groove. I have to say that I preferred earlier Suse versions for updates - I just ran YOU when I wanted to rather than having Zen start up at inconvenient times. Glad to learn from this thread that it is possible to set things up like they were before but it sounds like it may not be very easy.

Bogus Zaba