Manual install packages and letting zypper and yast know about it.

Hello,
I was curious if zypper and yast can somehow know about manually installed packages. For example I usually manually install kernel updates so that I can check the new kernel will work on a workstation and/or server. If I have a problem, I can revert back to the old kernel. I wanted to have zypper and yast be aware that I installed these package and have their caches updated. Is there a way? Thanks!

Jose

What do you mean when you say you "manually installed" them? What procedure are you using?

If your installing using an rpm then zypper and yast will know.

If installing from source and the source has a spec file, then you can build an rpm from the source archive using the following command:
rpmbuild -ta source.tar.gz

If not you'll have t make a spec file, I suggest borrowing the one from the kernel source rpm for your suse dist and editing it appropriately.

If you are running 11.2 there is a way to have multiple kernels installed at the same time, just edit /etc/zypp/zypp.conf and set

multiversion = kernel-default,kernel-desktop

where you list the kernels you want to retain multiple versions of. When an update happens, the old one will not be removed and will be available in GRUB to boot from. Naturally you have to clean up old kernels yourself with this setting enabled.

If you're compiling from source you can run checkinstall instead of make install.