Ziprugenypp

I've just upgraded to SUSE 10.1 yesterday. When I say upgraded, I mean I replaced my hardrive with a new, 100Gb 7200RPM disc in my laptop and gave myself a fresh installation for a change.

SUSE 10.1 has lots of nice improvements over the previous version - such as being able to use NetworkManager to switch wireless networks on the fly. It also has a fancy new installer/updater called librummikub which offers all sorts of wonderfulness, such as being able to install new software from packman repositories and things like that.

The only problem I have had is that Zmdastardlypp seems to be specially designed to make you tear your hair out. When I was testing betas of 10.1 I saw the new updater icon in the task tray, but it didn't look like they'd finished writing it yet, so I thought I'd hold off playing with it until they had. Now I have a final install of 10.1, and it still looks the same.

Well, at least I was able to find some pointers on the web on how to make this rugmyast thing work, so I added some repositories to it and asked if there were any updates. Afraid not, it said, and then crashed. I played around with it for a few hours until I got it to recognise that there were some updates available, at which point it decided to spend an hour resolving dependencies. It didn't crash this time - I had to kill its process.

Today I had another go. It must be possible to get this zypzenyrug thing to work. So I tried the commandline this time. It started to do an update, and then said 'Update failed' after about 25%, without giving me any idea why. I think it just got tired. I tried again, but a transaction was already in progress. So I killed it. Mwuahaha! Eventually I managed to get it to do a full update. Hooray!

And then I tried to update to KDE 3.5 using the supplementary repositories. I updated a few bits, but then it decided I need to insert KDE-3.5-supplementary in media 1, which was difficult, as I didn't have a KDE-3.5-supplementary to insert. I eventually worked out that if I renamed the repository to match that name then it would work. And I have updated KDE and installed KOffice (although it decided I wanted version 1.4 the first time).

I'd write full instructions on how to get libzubyagrust to work, except I can't really remember any more, it's all turned into a blur of trial and errors. Lots of errors. And trials. But I think if they keep working at it, they might be able to produce a good updating product in a couple of years. (I'd use fou4s, but it doesn't seem to work on 10.1).

By the way, I'd recommend SUSE 10.1, just so long as you don't expect an easy ride. The bits that work (and that's most of it) are great!