Package management.. lots of hassel for simple stuff!

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1

OS: OpenSUSE 11.2 (32-bit)
RAM: 2 GB
Intel x86
Nvidia geforce 8400m with latest proprietary drivers

This is getting in the way of so much, so someone please give me some insight!

I switched to OpenSUSE at last; note by previous posts I gave up a couple of times after having annoying problems. After getting fed up with Fedora updates that broke my files, and Ubuntu caring more about being idiot-friendly than usable, I wanted a more solid OS. I wiped Ubuntu off my desktop and laptop and began; this time, I am NOT stopping!

So… after a night or two of configuring, I was quite happy; Good job, OpenSUSE is my favourite OS now!

Anyway, the only thing getting in the way is the package management. Zypper on the CLI often freezes. For example, I just typed “zypper update” as root and it has been hanging doing nothing now for the last 10+ minutes. When I load the package manager in YaST, it usually freezes up and won’t get past 51%. This is incredibly frustrating! I haven’t been able to install any software in the last few days. Tried installing Google Chrome today and it came back with a warning about being unable to grab dependencies. I relogged in (hoping to kill any problems with YaST/package manager) and the installation froze at 51%. Another time, I was done working at my desktop a while ago. Before I went to bed I let it install updates. I turned on the monitor in the morning, and it wasn’t even started; the application froze.

Even when it DOES work, it’s very slow to do things. On Ubuntu and Fedora, it was quite a lot faster.

I am not leaving openSUSE; after learning this distro it feels like home!

2

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Anything in your various log files? I ran updates last night (adding the
official google-chrome-stable RPM finally) including a dependency (lsb,
plus some others) and all went flawlessly. I haven’t seen zypper hang in
any case on my 11.2 x86_64 or my wife’s 11.1 x86_64 system yet. Hopefully
the log files will show something. /var/log/zypper.log may be a place to
start along with /var/log/zypp/* neither of which I have looked at before.

Good luck.

On 05/26/2010 08:16 AM, newfie2 wrote:
>
> OS: OpenSUSE 11.2 (32-bit)
> RAM: 2 GB
> Intel x86
> Nvidia geforce 8400m with latest proprietary drivers
> _____
>
> This is getting in the way of so much, so someone please give me some
> insight!
>
> I switched to OpenSUSE at last; note by previous posts I gave up a
> couple of times after having annoying problems. After getting fed up
> with Fedora updates that broke my files, and Ubuntu caring more about
> being idiot-friendly than usable, I wanted a more solid OS. I wiped
> Ubuntu off my desktop and laptop and began; this time, I am NOT
> stopping!
>
> So… after a night or two of configuring, I was quite happy; Good job,
> OpenSUSE is my favourite OS now!
>
>
> Anyway, the only thing getting in the way is the package management.
> Zypper on the CLI often freezes. For example, I just typed “zypper
> update” as root and it has been hanging doing nothing now for the last
> 10+ minutes. When I load the package manager in YaST, it usually freezes
> up and won’t get past 51%. This is incredibly frustrating! I haven’t
> been able to install any software in the last few days. Tried installing
> Google Chrome today and it came back with a warning about being unable
> to grab dependencies. I relogged in (hoping to kill any problems with
> YaST/package manager) and the installation froze at 51%. Another time, I
> was done working at my desktop a while ago. Before I went to bed I let
> it install updates. I turned on the monitor in the morning, and it
> wasn’t even started; the application froze.
>
> Even when it DOES work, it’s very slow to do things. On Ubuntu and
> Fedora, it was quite a lot faster.
>
> I am not leaving openSUSE; after learning this distro it feels like
> home!
>
>
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3

newfie2 wrote:
> Zypper on the CLI often freezes…When I load the package manager
> in YaST, it usually freezes up and won’t get past 51%.

my opinion (which may or may not be factual in your case) is that
both Zypper and YaST (they are the same by the way, YaST > Software
Management is a GUI front end for Zypper) are not so much slow and
freeze candidates as they are very terrible at telling you that
something is going on…you just can’t see it…there is a LOT of
stuff happening:

-it looks at the entire list of what you have installed previously
-it finds the repos (not always a FAST operation since they are almost
all university or government computers GIVING us their bandwidth,
and often throttling our speed to make sure THEIR students/workers get
fast service, first)
-and then looks at ALL the packages on the repo looking for what you
are searching for (or any updates)
-then if if finds what you want it looks to see if other things have
to be installed (called 'dependencies) then
-it tells you other stuff is needed and asks if you want that stuff…
-then FINALLY you see stuff being downloaded…

i’ve seen all of that happen in one minute and one half
hour–depending on network traffic, what else is going on on my
machine (TAKING clock cycles) like watching a streaming movie or music…

everything hitting the hard drive or using the CPU is gonna slow
down zypper/YaST…

my policy is: EXPECT it to be S L O W and NOT start an upgrade or
down load while i want to listen/watch/browse…OR five minutes
before i must shut down the machine and scoot…

instead, i assume it might take 30 minutes and i will NOT even attempt
to abort a YaST or Zypper action once begun—why, because it almost
ALWAYS chokes up and screws up the rpm database, or leaves a lockfile
or something gets haywire somewhere…read around: DO NOT ABORT
EITHER A Zypper or YaST session…that abort button is SURE TROUBLE…

now, most people learn that the hard way after they come here and say
their YaST/Zypper is SO slow and freezes a lot…and, once they get
it fixed and learn to NOT ABORT the run, they all live happily ever
after…

i have forgotten how to repair zypper/YaST, someone else can tell
you…then, when you get it fixed plan on NOT seeing it tell you
every second that something is happening and it has NOT frozen…and,
just start the install process and WALK away and do something else
until it is finished…

if you come back in 30 minutes and it still has neither finished NOR
given an error…take a walk around the block…and, you can look
into /var/log/zypper.log and see what is going on

ymmv

–
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
posted via NNTP w/TBird 2.0.0.23 | KDE 3.5.7 | openSUSE 10.3
2.6.22.19-0.4-default SMP i686
AMD Athlon 1 GB RAM | GeForce FX 5500 | ASRock K8Upgrade-760GX |
CMedia 9761 AC’97 Audio

4

Did you disable ipv6 when installing? If not, try booting with a boot code to disable ipv6 and see if that helps:

ipv6.disable=1

Also, keep your repositories to the minimum. I recommend 4. You do NOT need any more. Keep them down to OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman. Only add others if needed for special applications (not on the 4 repos I mentioned) and then as soon as you completed installing the application from a 5th repos, remove the 5th repos. That simple act is better to avoid instability, to avoid dependency problems, and it will speed up your installations/updates.

5

Just a small side note on DenverDs comments regarding the behaviour of YaST / zypper: in current versions both work much much faster than the 10.3-versions (which DenverD still uses) of YaST / zypper, also YaST is more verbose than it used to be. I remember well that YaST drove me crazy because of its low speed and non-verbosity, since 11.0 it actually works very fast, so the symptoms described here are definitely pointing to a problem.

IPv6 indeed is a good hint.

6

Sorry for huge in time :slight_smile:

I have had sooo much annoyance with installing software lately; seems to be getting even worse now. I left something to install, made a phonecall and came back about an hour later and it’s still only at 1% according to YaST! Tried to install GNOME:


Deleting patterns-openSUSE-kde4_pure
Downloading zenity (download size 236.00 kB)
Installing zenity-2.28.0-2.5.i586.rpm (installed size 859.00 kB)
Downloading xorg-x11-server-extra (download size 2.11 MB)
Installing xorg-x11-server-extra-7.4-61.63.1.i586.rpm (installed size 5.45 MB)
Downloading xdg-user-dirs-gtk (download size 19.00 kB)
Installing xdg-user-dirs-gtk-0.8-6.6.i586.rpm (installed size 40.00 kB)
Downloading xchat (download size 313.00 kB)
Installing xchat-2.8.6-44.45.2.i586.rpm (installed size 802.00 kB)
Downloading wv (download size 223.00 kB)
Installing wv-1.2.2-216.3.i586.rpm (installed size 669.00 kB)
Downloading t1lib (download size 147.00 kB)

An hour later and that’s what I see; same thing as when I picked up the phone.

How and where do I add that IPV6 line? And should I back up stuff just in case? Bear with me, I’m new to SUSE and RPM distros in general.

Edit: I also do not want to risk Aborting it, since it’s dealing with major stuff.

7

This sounds like an incredibly slow network connection (but probably isn’t exactly that, in a straightforward way). I think 51% in yast is pretty much where it starts getting information from the repos that you have enabled, so it sounds as if it stalls when it has to get the updated index from its first repository.

Assuming that you’ve first tried oldcpu’s suggestion (ipv6.disable=1) and that didn’t help, I’d suspect either something is blocked in a firewall, or that, for some reason, you are not getting name service resolutions (look ups) for the addresses concerned. (Err, or your network really is terrifically slow, or someone has done something with ‘quality of service’ setting top reduce the performance on that port).

Can you take one of the repo addresses and try to ping it? For example

ping -c 10 download.opensuse.org

(btw, packman does tend to be a bit slow…not as slow as you have reported, but on the slower side, for reasons explained above)

And also try ‘dig’ to check that you are getting name resolution in a reasonably quickly.

8 
michael@opensuse-laptop:~> ping -c 10 download.opensuse.org
PING download.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=179 ms
64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=156 ms
64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=166 ms
64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=4 ttl=48 time=154 ms
64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=5 ttl=48 time=155 ms
64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=6 ttl=48 time=155 ms
64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=7 ttl=48 time=155 ms
64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=8 ttl=48 time=155 ms
64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=9 ttl=48 time=156 ms
64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=10 ttl=48 time=158 ms

--- download.opensuse.org ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 154.812/159.378/179.422/7.477 ms

That’s what it returned.

I didn’t try the ipv6 thing. In my last post I asked how to go about doing it :slight_smile:

Edit: I should also add that the current GNOME download is now at 9%. Taking ages!

9

Its a boot code.

When you boot your PC, you first get a splash/boot screen (provided by the program grub) where you select openSUSE, or the failsafe settings, or Windows.

While you have the openSUSE boot selection highlighted, type:

ipv6.disable=1

and you should see that in the options line.

Then with the nominal openSUSE boot selected, press <return> and proceed to do a normal boot.

Then try your YaST or zypper update and see if it is still so slow.

10

On Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:56:01 GMT, newfie2
<newfie2@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
>Code:
>--------------------
> michael@opensuse-laptop:~> ping -c 10 download.opensuse.org
> PING download.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130) 56(84) bytes of data.
> 64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=1 ttl=48 time=179 ms
> 64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=2 ttl=48 time=156 ms
> 64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=3 ttl=48 time=166 ms
> 64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=4 ttl=48 time=154 ms
> 64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=5 ttl=48 time=155 ms
> 64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=6 ttl=48 time=155 ms
> 64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=7 ttl=48 time=155 ms
> 64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=8 ttl=48 time=155 ms
> 64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=9 ttl=48 time=156 ms
> 64 bytes from pontifex.opensuse.org (195.135.221.130): icmp_seq=10 ttl=48 time=158 ms
>
> — download.opensuse.org ping statistics —
> 10 packets transmitted, 10 received, 0% packet loss, time 9004ms
> rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 154.812/159.378/179.422/7.477 ms
>
>--------------------
>
>
>That’s what it returned.
>
>I didn’t try the ipv6 thing. In my last post I asked how to go about
>doing it :slight_smile:
>
>Edit: I should also add that the current GNOME download is now at 9%.
>Taking ages!

It sounds like you are downloading the whole pattern of gnome, which is
in the gigabyte range. Even with high speed Internet this can take
hours.
My typical oS install DVD (4.5 GiB) is an overnight proposition.

11

That’s right, but it was only ~600 MB.

Even small stuff like “zypper search” takes up to 10 minutes to work.

12

Have you tried turning off ivp6 as recommended? If it works you can make permanent by adding the option to your /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

Some ISPs still are not supporting ivp6.

13

While that isn’t the fastest thing known to man, it is more a bit mediocre than slow as such, and it is consistent. Your performance isn’t just slow, it is very slow, so that isn’t it.

14

If nothing so far is helping, can you make a few comments about your connection to the internet. What kind of connection do you have (eg, DSL? and what nominal rate) and what is your connection to the internet box (ethernet, wireless, usb).