SLES Package Management

Suse is RPM based distribution and its package repositories are YUM-compatible.  Native package management tools in Suse are inferior to yum. 

Also development packages are no longer on main DVD. They are on SDK DVD that need to be downloaded separately.

NOVELL Downloads - SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Software Development Kit e-Media Kit

The best command line tool for installation of packages in Suse is zypper

# zypper info mc
Refreshing service 'nu_novell_com'.
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...

Information for package mc:

Repository: SLES11-SP2-Updates
Name: mc
Version: 4.6.2.pre1-121.33.1
Arch: x86_64
Vendor: SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany
Support Level: Level 3
Installed: Yes
Status: up-to-date
Installed Size: 3.1 MiB
Summary: Midnight Commander
Description:
Midnight Commander is a Norton Commander clone, a program that
manipulates and manages files and directories. It is useful, fast, and
... ... ...

Among supported packages on Suse 11 are:

• Argus
  • argus-client 3.0.0 (Client for Network Monitoring Tool)
  • argus-server 3.0.0 (Daemon for Network Monitoring Tool)
  • argus 3.0.0 (Network Monitoring Tool)
• bash  (The GNU Bourne-Again Shell) Version 4.1.7 is procompiled. Bashdb can be downloaded from openSuse site.
• expect 5.44.1.11 (A Tool for Automating Interactive Programs)
• lha 1.14.0.894 (Pack Program)
• lsof 4.80 (A Program That Lists Information about Files Opened by Processes)
• mc 4.6.2.pre1 (Midnight Commander)  -- this is an outdated version so you need to compile newer version yourself.
• mtools 3.9.11 (Access Files on an MS-DOS File System)
• nc6 1.0 (Netcat with IPv6 Support)
• netcat 1.10 (A Simple But Powerful Network Tool)
• nmap 4.75 (Portscanner)
• pfmon 3.7 (Performance monitoring tool for Linux)
• sysconfig 0.71.14 (The sysconfig scheme)
• yelp 2.24.0 (The GNOME 2.x Desktop Help Browser)
• zip 2.32 (File compression program)
• zoo 2.10 (Pack Program)

Suse 11 also provides precompiled packages for:

• Puppet
• Nagios
• mirror 2.9 (Perl Scripts for Mirroring FTP Servers)
• mon 0.99.2 (The Mon Network Monitoring System)
• nessus-core 2.2.6 (Powerful Security Scanner)
• nessus-libraries 2.2.6 (Powerful Security Scanner Libraries)

NEWS CONTENTS

• 190419 : openSUSE News " Blog Archive " Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 10.3 New Package Management ( openSUSE News " Blog Archive " Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 10.3 New Package Management, )
• 190419 : Package Management With Zypper Linux Journal ( Package Management With Zypper Linux Journal, )

Old News ;-)

openSUSE News " Blog Archive " Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 10.3 New Package Management

In addition to this, two new tools were also created in order to work with the new libzypp:

• zypper, an advanced, featureful command-line tool. Below are a couple of usage examples to see zypper in action:

Displaying your repository list:

opensuse:~ # zypper repos
# | Enabled | Refresh | Type | Name | URI
–+---+---+--–+-----+--------------------------–
1 | Yes | Yes | yast2 | 10.3 - Main Repository (NON-OSS) | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-Factory-non-oss/inst-source-extra/
2 | Yes | Yes | rpm-md | KDE:Community | http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Community/openSUSE_Factory
3 | Yes | Yes | yast2 | 10.3 - Main Repository (OSS) | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/

Installing a package:

opensuse:/home/francis # zypper install filelight
* Reading repository '10.3 - Main Repository (NON-OSS)' cache
* Reading repository 'KDE:Community' cache
* Reading repository '10.3 - Main Repository (OSS)' cache
* Reading installed packages [100%]
The following NEW package is going to be installed:
filelight
Overall download size: 619.3 K. After the operation, additional 1.0 M will be used.
Continue? [y/n]: y
Downloading package filelight-1.0-6.1.i586, 619.3 K (1.0 M unpacked)
* Installing: filelight-1.0-6.1 [100%]

• openSUSE Updater, a software updater applet that notifies you about software updates. The new one contains a small dialog to notify you of its progress:

What kind of advantages does this package management have over the old, pre SUSE Linux 10.1, package management?

The pre-10.1 stack, while mature, was showing its limitations. With the ZYpp based stacks we got:

• A better resolver than before
  • Predictable behavior supported by a testsuite of upgrade and install scenarios
  • More information about why a package is installed or no solution is found
• A better integration of all those feature that were added over the years to our package manager.
• A common handling of packages *and* patches together
• Dependency handling for update packages
• A better way to handle selections (we call them "patterns" now)
• More flexibility in handling of different repositories, e.g. it is possible to have additional patterns for each repository.
• Additional dependencies based on language (for fonts, translations, etc.) or hardware (for drivers)

And now in 10.3 you will get:

• Cleaner separation of different tasks like repository management, repository refresh, dependency resolution, package download and package installation. No more refresh and parsing during startup.
• More compatibility with tools like yum and smart, we use the standard .repo files to list known repositories. The same format smart and yum uses and the same files you can find in the openSUSE build service repositories.
• More speed for the common use case: install a package, search from the command line or upgrade your system.
• More user-frendly notification applets.
• A saner policy for 3rd party packages. They are not locked by default.

Upgrade candidates are considered from the same vendor, so you don't jump automatically between feature-sets and vendors as new versions are available.

Package Management With Zypper Linux Journal

As I've mentioned before I'm an openSUSE user, and as long as they don't make the "U" lower case again, I'll probably stick with it. When it comes to package management, OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprice (and SuSE before them) are usually associated with YaST (and yes, I'm still waiting for them to upper case the "a"). YaST works well but it's a bit verbose for installing a single package, and of course that's just more fodder for the apt-getters with all their apt-get install this and their apt-get install thats. And you can't argue with them, but there are other options with openSUSE: yum and apt4rpm come to mind, but the preferred solution is zypper.

Zypper is a command line tool for package management, it's based on ZYpp, aka libzypp. The WikiPedia entry for Zypp says:

Unlike other common package managers, it provides a powerful satisfiability solver to compute package dependencies and a convenient package management API.

Since we don't want our heads to explode we'll just take it for granted that a powerful satisfiability solver is a good thing.

It turns out that YaST is also (now) based on ZYpp so you don't need to worry that you're missing out on something by using zypper.

Zypper is fairly straightforward to use. If you want to search for a package do zypper search STRING.... The STRING(s) can include * and ? wildcards and there are options for matching all or any of the strings and for full exact matches (the default is a partial match). If you want to search the package descriptions there's an option for that also. For example to search for packages with the word "mail" in the name or in the description do:

$ zypper search --search-descriptions mail
$ # --search-descriptions can be abbreviated as -d
Reading installed packages...

S | Name                 | Summary                                | Type
--+----------------------+----------------------------------------+-----------
  | Buddi                | Buddi - Personal budget software ...   | package
  | CgEddie              | A simple editor with syntax high ...   | package
  | FrostWire            | Gnutella peer-to-peer (P2P) file ...   | package
  ...
i | yast2-mail           | YaST2 - Mail Configuration             | package
  | yast2-mail-plugins   | YaST2-Users/Group Plugins for the ...  | package
  | yum-updatesd         | YUM update notification daemon         | package

When installing packages with zypper, as you'd expect/hope, zypper takes care of installing the package's dependencies:

$ zypper install Buddi
Reading installed packages...

The following NEW packages are going to be installed:
  BrowserLauncher2 swingx Buddi jcommon jfreechart

Overall download size: 4.1 M. After the operation, additional 5.2 M will be used.
Continue? [YES/no]:

Some of the other interesting commands that zypper supports are:

• refresh - to refresh the package information from the repositories you have defined.
• addrepo - to add a new repository.
• remove - to remove a package.
• list-updates - to list the updates/patches that are available for the packages you have installed.

For a full list of the commands that zypper supports type zypper help and check the man page for more details.

One of Ubuntu's WOW factors seems to be apt-get dist-upgrade, i.e. the ability to upgrade to the next version of Ubuntu (and actually it's a feature of any debian based distro). This is another thing that the apt-getters puff up about, well enter zypper dist-upgrade or zypper dup. This allows you to upgrade from one version of openSUSE to the next. I have not used this feature yet, but posts on the openSUSE wiki seem to indicate that it works well.

So to all you apt-getters out there, all I can say is: zypp it.

Recommended Links

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Technical Specifications Detailed descriptions of all packages included on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server. Check the support site to see the list of supported packages.

Package Management With Zypper Linux Journal

Reference

zypper help [command]

DESCRIPTION

zypper is a command-line interface to ZYpp system management library. It can be used to install, update, remove software, manage repositories, perform various queries, and more.

CONCEPTS

Most of the following concepts are common for all applications based on the libzypp package management library, but there are some zypper specifics.

Repositories

Libzypp works with package metadata, that is information about packages and their relations extracted from RPM packages and other data like patch information, pattern definitions, etc. These data are stored together with the RPM files in folders called repositories. Repositories can be placed on various media like an HTTP or FTP server, DVD, or a folder on a local disc.

There is a special set of commands in zypper intented to manipulate repositories. Also many commands and options take a repository as an arugment. See section COMMANDS, subsection Repository Management for more details.

Resource Identfiers (URI)

To specify locations of repositories or other resources (RPM files, .repo files) you can use any type of URIs supported by libzypp. See http://en.opensuse.org/Libzypp/URI for a complete list and usage examples.

In addition to these URIs you can use plain directory and file paths in which case zypper automatically treats them as dir:/path URIs.

Refresh

Refreshing a repository means downloading metadata of packages from the medium (if needed), storing it in local cache (typically under /var/cache/zypp/raw/<alias> directory) and preparsing the metadata into .solv files (building the solv cache), typically under /var/cache/zypp/solv/<alias>.

The metadata get refreshed either automatically or on user request. An automatic refresh takes place right before reading metadata from the database if the auto-refresh is enabled for the repository and the metada is reported to be out of date. If the auto-refresh is disabled, the repository will only be refreshed on user request. You can request a refresh by calling zypper refresh (see the documentation of the refresh command for details).

The repository metadata are checked for changes before actually doing the refresh. A change is detected by downloading one or two metadata index files (small files) and comparing the checksums of the cached ones and the remote ones. If the files differ, the repository is out of date and will be refreshed.

To delay the up-to-date check (and thus the automatic refresh) for a certain number of minutes, edit the value of the repo.refresh.delay attribute of ZYpp config file (/etc/zypp/zypp.conf). This means, zypper will not even try to download and check the index files, and you will be able to use zypper for operations like search or info without internet access or root privileges.

Services

Services are one level above repositories and serve to manage repositories or to do some special tasks. Libzypp currently supports only one type of services, the Repository Index Service (RIS).

Repository Index Service (RIS) is a special type of repository which contains a list of other repositories. This list can be generated dynamically by the server according to some URI parameters or user name, or can be static. Once such service is added to your system, zypper takes care of adding, modifying, or removing these repositories on your system to reflect the current list. See section Service Management and http://en.opensuse.org/Standards/Repository_Index_Service for more details.

Package Types

zypper works with several types of resource objects, called resolvables. A resolvable is a package, patch, pattern, or a product.

package - an ordinary RPM package. patch - update of one or more packages. A patch can include special scripts and messages to be run or shown during installation of the update. pattern - group of packages required or recommended to install some functionality. product - group of packages which are necessary to install a product. srcpackage - source code package (.src.rpm). This type works in search and install commands.

Throughout this manual we will refer to resolvables simply as packages and to resolvable types as package types. These type names can be used as arguments of --type option in several commands like install, info, or search.

Package Dependencies

Software packages depend on each other in various ways. Packages usually require or recommend other packages, they can declare that they conflict with other packages, etc. Packages can also depend on specific hardware. See http://en.opensuse.org/Software_Management/Dependencies for more information. Zypper utilizes a dependency solver to find out what packages are needed to be installed according to user's request.

COMMANDS

zypper provides a number of commands. Each command accepts the options listed in the GLOBAL OPTIONS section. These options must be specified before the command name. In addition, many commands have specific options, which are listed in this section. These command-specific options must be specified after the name of the command and before any of the command arguments.

General Commands

Package Management Commands

Update Management Commands

Query Commands

Repository Management

Zypper is able to work with YaST, RPM-MD (yum) software repositories, and plain directories containing .rpm files.

Repositories are primarily identified using their URI or alias. Alias serves as a shorthand for the long URI or name of the repository. The name of the repository should briefly describe the repository and is shown to the user in tables and messages. The name is not required, and if not known, the alias is shown instead. The alias is required and uniquely identifies the repository on the system.

The alias, name, URI, or the number from zypper repos list can be used to specify a repository as an argument of various zypper commands and options like refresh, --repo, or --from.

Apart from the above, repositories have several other properties which can be set using the commands described in this section below, or by manually editing the repository definition files (.repo files, see section FILES).

Service Management

The services, addservice, removeservice, modifyservice, and refresh-services commands serve for manipulating services. A service is specified by its URI and needs to have a unique alias defined (among both services and repositories).

Standalone repositories (not belonging to any service) are treated like services, too. The ls command will list them, ms command will modify them, etc. Repository specific options, like --keep-packages are not available here, though. You can use repository handling commands to manipulate them.

Package Locks Management

Package locks serve the purpose of preventing changes to the set of installed packages on the system. The locks are stored in form of a query in /etc/zypp/locks file (see also locks(5)). Packages matching this query are then forbidden to change their installed status; an installed package can't be removed, not installed package can't be installed. When requesting to install or remove such locked package, you will get a dependency problem dialog.

Other Commands

GLOBAL OPTIONS

FILES

EXIT CODES

There are several exit codes defined for zypper for use e.g. within scripts. These codes are defined in header file src/zypper-main.h found in zypper source package. Codes from interval (1-5) denote an error, numbers (100-105) provide a specific information, 0 represents a normal successful run. Following is a list of these codes with descriptions.

COMPATIBILITY WITH RUG

zypper is designed to be compatible with rug, which is a command-line interface to the ZENworks Linux Management (ZLM) agent. Compared to rug, zypper does not need the ZLM daemon to run, and is intented to provide more and improved functionality. Following is a list of zypper-rug command aliases, supported rug command line options, and compatibility notes. See also compatibility notes in descriptions of zypper commands.

To enable rug-compatible behavior, use the -r or --rug-compatible global option with each command.

Service Management Commands

ZENworks uses different terminology than ZYpp. ZLM services are ZYpp's repositories and services. Additionally some ZLM services can contain catalogs (rpmmd-type repositories in ZYpp speak).

Zypper tries to mimick rug's behavior in its service handling commands when used with the -r global option. It also supports the --catalog option for specifying catalogs to work with in current operation (this is an alias for zypper's --repo option).

Package Management Commands

Patch Management Commands

Pattern Management Commands

Product Management Commands

System Commands

Other Compatibility Notes

HOMEPAGE

http://en.opensuse.org/Zypper

AUTHORS

Martin Vidner <[email protected]> Duncan Mac-Vicar <[email protected]> Jan Kupec <[email protected]> Stanislav Visnovsky <[email protected]> Josef Reidinger <[email protected]>

SEE ALSO

rug(1), YaST2(8), locks(5)

Etc

Society

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Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

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The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: March 12, 2019