I've run into issues with the software updater applet
since I added sources and subscribed to catalogs using
both the updater and the command rug. After several
hours of digging, I think I found out what was going on.

Either rug or the applet will update the zen daemon
sources, but not the sources in yast2. I think my
inconsistencies were because different information
was being referenced in different places.

I just did some testing, and I see that adding a new
source in yast2 and making it synchronize with zen
will show that they have the same sources. I'm hoping
this will fix the problems I've seen where packages
cannot be updated and packages that are present in
other sources will appear in the available list.

Just wondering if anyone else has run into issues
like this and if there's a better solution.

Which version of SuSE do you have. If it is OpenSuSE 10.1, zen is pretty much broken. In OpenSuSE 10.2 it was better but would eat up a lot of resources. In 10.3, they got rid of zen. The update applet works great. ( so much for mono IMHO )

Maybe if you went into YaST and pruned you repository sources, you will clear out a number of problems.

Sometimes, your timing is off and a site is updated when you system is trying to install security updates and you get a few failures. Waiting a day or two might help.

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Sorry, I didn't spend enough time reading your title. You indicated that you are using Sled. Pruning any duplicates might help. You could also try an alternate source if there is a particular one. Some will have a better bandwidth than others which should help. Once I noticed while using ftp that one site was very sluggish compared to a different repo, so I changed my update sources.

Actually I'm glad you didn't notice I am using SLED,
because you went into more details of the history
of the zen updater. I was spoiled using apt on Debian
because it was fast. Sometimes it takes over 20 minutes
for the refresh and over 10 minutes to resolve depend-
encies with zmd.

I'll try disabling all the sources except the one for
security updates and see if it runs any faster.

I listened to a SuSE podcast. This is when OpenSUSE 10.3 was released. They were proud of the one-click installation, and readily admitted that automatic updates in OpenSUSE 10.1 was broken. The packages and libraries for OpenSUSE 10.1 match SuSE SLED. One improvement in 10.3 is that updating doesn't need to download all of the meta-data of all the repositories.

I just remembered one problem that I had with openSuSE10.1. Something happened where temporary directories weren't being delected in /tmp. There was a ridiculous number of empty directories which realy slowed things down.


http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect....071101-032.ogg
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect....071004_028.ogg

I did discover a lot of old directories in /tmp which
I removed, but I don't notice any speed increase.

Incidentally, the problem with updating acroread fixed
itself once I synchronized the sources in rug and yast2.

Now I just need to figure out how to get the 64 bit
version of mysql to patch correctly.

Okay, I've finally gotten to the bottom of it all.
Running "yast online_update" is different than running
"rug lu" and "rug up", even when you have the same
sources for yast and zmd.

The "yast online_update" command was able to properly
patch mysql and it found about 30 more patches that the
software updater did not find.

I plan to keep the software updater applet running,
but I'll use yast as the primary interface for managing
installed software and updates.