How To Determine New Installed Software?

I am getting increasingly frustrated with newbie requests to help fix function-A, because they did an update that broke function-A, but they have not a clue as to what they updated.

It seems my request that newbies take notes as to what they are doing, is falling on deaf ears. Maybe they don't teach young people how to use pen and paper in schools any more. :blink:

Please, can anyone suggest a konsole command (or simple sequence of commands) or a gui tool, that will chronologically list the date in which software was installed on one's system?

Note - the chronological aspect is KEY here!

If we can do that, then when the newbies come up with these "I don't know what I updated" statements, we can point them to find out what they updated!

Presumably an rpm command, or a smart packager manager command, or even a rug/yast command.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions/solutions. Having such a command line (or gui) tool would do wonders to lowering my blood pressure level. :lol:

How about

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME} - INSTALLED - %{INSTALLTIME:date}\n'

It should dump it in an order where the "latest" installed patches/software is at the bottom.

LOL, I have the exact same command in a 2 lines shell script. I use it to grep for a specific package and see when I installed it... eg,

queryrpm | grep '^xvid'

There is also a log, at least for the things you install with yast: /var/log/YaST2/y2logRPM

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME} - INSTALLED - %{INSTALLTIME:date}\n'
It should dump it in an order where the "latest" installed patches/software is at the bottom.[/b]

Thats a NEAT command. And very useful! Thanks.

Unfortunately, it is not in chronological. I'm not sure what order its in.

There is also a log, at least for the things you install with yast: /var/log/YaST2/y2logRPM[/b]

Thats a good log. And its chronological.

But looking at the SuSE-10.2 PC that I have, it does not seem to have all the YaST update entries. ... For example, the last YaST update in that file on one my SuSE-10.2 PC's is in March-2007, and I know for a fact I have used YaST to install some updates from Novell/SuSE, since March. Makes me think some of the SuSE-10.2 package management problems also extend to bugs in a failure to properly update that log file.

Well in that case:

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{installtime} %{name}-%{version}-%{release} %{installtime:date}\n' | sort -nr +1 | sed -e 's/^[^ ]* //'

Wonders what you can find from rpm.org

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{installtime} %{name}-%{version}-%{release} %{installtime:date}\n' | sort -nr +1 | sed -e 's/^[^ ]* //'
Wonders what you can find from rpm.org
[/b]

Amazing. ... where do you come up with this.

The sort criteria still needs some work (as its not yet chronological, ... at least not on my SuSE-10.1 PC, I have not yet tried it on my 10.2 PC). It looks like there is some sort of offset, that may need tweaking to give proper chronological by installation date.

I'm getting perfect chrono order as a result. *ponder*

I'm getting perfect chrono order as a result. *ponder*
[/b]

According to my notes, the last package I update I did was last night, ... yet here is the first part of the output of that command, with a bunch of 10-Jun-2006 updates in front!

But now that I look at it closer, I'm thinking its a simple matter of applications that start with a number mess up the chronological retreival.

And hence it does work. WELL DONE! AND THANKYOU.

855resolution-0.4-16 Sat 10 Jun 2006 11:20:28 AM CEST
3ddiag-0.735-1.6 Sat 22 Jul 2006 06:58:47 AM CEST
3gpwiz-1.3-0.pm.0 Thu 15 Jun 2006 06:18:08 PM CEST
kplayer-0.6.3-1.guru.suse101 Tue 31 Jul 2007 06:49:58 PM CEST
xpdf-tools-3.01-21.10 Tue 31 Jul 2007 06:49:52 PM CEST
xpdf-3.01-21.10 Tue 31 Jul 2007 06:49:50 PM CEST
dosbox-0.71-0.pm.1 Tue 31 Jul 2007 06:48:53 PM CEST
evolution-2.6.0-49.58 Tue 31 Jul 2007 06:48:43 PM CEST
easytag-2.1.2-0.pm.0 Tue 31 Jul 2007 06:48:36 PM CEST
ntfs-config-1.0.1-1.1 Tue 31 Jul 2007 06:46:58 PM CEST
MozillaFirefox-translations-2.0.0.6-2.1 Tue 31 Jul 2007 06:46:22 PM CEST
MozillaFirefox-2.0.0.6-2.1 Tue 31 Jul 2007 06:46:11 PM CEST
ffmpeg-0.4.9-8.pm.svn20070705 Sat 28 Jul 2007 12:44:09 PM CEST
libffmpeg0-0.4.9-8.pm.svn20070705 Sat 28 Jul 2007 12:43:44 PM CEST
seamonkey-spellchecker-1.1.3-4.1 Thu 26 Jul 2007 09:45:56 PM CEST
opera-9.22-0.1 Thu 26 Jul 2007 09:45:54 PM CEST
ktorrent-2.2.1-1.guru.suse101 Thu 26 Jul 2007 09:45:42 PM CEST
seamonkey-1.1.3-4.1 Thu 26 Jul 2007 09:45:25 PM CEST
winki-0.4.4-0.pm.1 Thu 19 Jul 2007 08:19:10 PM CEST
flash-player-9.0.48.0-3.1 Thu 19 Jul 2007 08:19:08 PM CEST
samba-3.0.22-13.32 Thu 19 Jul 2007 08:16:20 PM CEST
cups-1.1.23-40.20 Thu 19 Jul 2007 08:16:16 PM CEST
cups-client-1.1.23-40.20 Thu 19 Jul 2007 08:16:12 PM CEST

Well in that case:

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{installtime} %{name}-%{version}-%{release} %{installtime:date}\n' | sort -nr +1 | sed -e 's/^[^ ]* //'

Wonders what you can find from rpm.org
[/b]

Hey daphoenix,

I showed this to one of our Linux engineers, at the office. He liked it, but with in 3 minutes he came to the point of view that the query could be improved by changing the "1" to a "0" as per this:

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{installtime} %{name}-%{version}-%{release} %{installtime:date}\n' | sort -nr +0 | sed -e 's/^[^ ]* //'

Now that he has showed that possible "improvement" to me, we are both wondering why a '1' was used instead of a '0'.

The difference is when using the "0", applications that start with a number, are properly sorted, while when using a "1", they are not.