The software management for OpenSuse 10.3 is in heavy development. Compared to 10.2 zmd was dropped, leaving yast and zypper. Both work now basically.

Package management in OpenSUSE in recent years has had its share of challenges. In OpenSUSE 10.1, the package management was an epic trainwreck. Package management in OpenSUSE 10.3 is as good as that was bad. There are various types of speed improvements. Some of them huge. There is some caching of the repository package info. Progress bars so the user knows what’s going on.

Somehow zypper decided that my computer would function just fine without supporting the harddrive (RAID0) but I was forced to disagree with this point when my computer became unbootable. Luckily the installation DVD (after finally downloading) was able to fix the problem.

In this article we will be covering all of the changes in and around the package management stack in the upcoming openSUSE 11.0. The new package management is among the fastest, most memory efficient and featureful PM stacks available. There have been a plethora of both visual and behind-the-scenes changes.

What’s the single biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry? It’s an interesting question, and one that in my opinion has a very simple answer: Package management—or, more specifically, the ability to install and upgrade software over the network in a seamlessly integrated fashion—along with the distributed development model package management enabled.

Recent “zypper update” on November’s openSUSE 11.2 release brought system to the most recent status. Current 2.6.31.8-xen kernel works fine.Seems like a next generation of xen-ified aka Suse kernels is on the go right now. However, i believe,that vm-install on recently updated 11.2 works same way as before maintenance update.

All Linux distributions have things in common, but many differ in software installation and updating. Gentoo Linux is based on Portage, SUSE uses YaST, Red Hat and Fedora opt for yum, Linspire prefers CNR.... Oh, and don't forget the different package options: RPM, Debian, source, and more esoteric options.

openSUSE 10.3 is set to contain a new, significantly improved and more mature package management stack by default. ZMD, the package management component causing problems in SUSE Linux 10.1 and to a lesser extent in openSUSE 10.2, has been completely removed and is now replaced by the new libzypp and its tools.

I have previously installed KDE 4.0 RC2 on Kubuntu. It involved adding deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu gutsy main to your /etc/apt/sources.list and then installing a few KDE4 based packages. To be true, I was not able to do that using Adept, the Kubuntu package manager. I had to go to command line and then the install went fine.
OpenSUSE, however, changes the entire perspective of installing applications. Their revolutionary 1-Click install performs the job very well here too. All we need to do is to goto KDE4 page on OpenSUSE website and click the install button.