I have OpenSUSE Leap 15.0 running on a Dell Latitude E6230 laptop. I just witnessed something strange on this machine. It has an infamous Broadcom wireless card. According to various docs, this card is supposed to run OK with the broadcom-wl driver, but after experimenting a bit with it, I found out that this driver only works in the sense that chickens fly and horses swim. I removed the broadcom-wl and broadcom-wl-kmp-default packages, and then simply installed the Broadcom firmware using install_bcm43xx_firmware. After rebooting, the card worked fine.
I’m using the KDE desktop with the little updater applet. Yesterday I used this button to update the system, and curiously enough, the broadcom-wl related packages were reinstalled. Which means after the subsequent reboot, my wireless card worked erratically again.
WTF ?
How can I blacklist these packages to prevent them from ever reinstalling automagically again under the hood ?
YaST > Software > Software Managment; Search for the package using the Search function; Right-Click on the package and select the appropraite (Taboo IIRC) item.
Or use zypper, see
man zypper
and scroll down to the chapter “Package Locks Management”.
BTW, my personal advice: do not use that applet, but use YaST and/or zypper.
During the years with Leap 42.3 through 15.0, in order to remove clutter and keep my main rig mean and lean, I’ve used YaST2’s software management module to set packages never to be installed to »taboo«. Thanks to this thread and a bit of man-page reading, I now understand that YaST apparently relies on zypper to track those »taboo« packages; and holy package, Batman, must I have been busy:
(About half of those locks — 171 of 325 — exclude always-optional language packs; there ought to be a way to prevent those from being installed automagically in the first place. Hmmm…)
Next thing I did was to redirect this output to a permanent text file I will consult for any new installation. Very handy!
I really need to learn more zypper tricks instead of always going the lazy and luxurious YaST route. Cheers!
Well, both YaST > Software and zypper interface to zypplib. So both have their pros and cons for ease of use like ebery other pair of GUI and CLI tools. Specialy for “mass” or “batch” actions (either by direct entereing or by embedding then in scripts) a CLI tool is of course more easy then the one by one approach of GUI programs.
If one locks the broadcom-wl-kmp packages, they will not match any new kernel(update). If you do, lock the matching kernel packages as well. FWIW this would not be my solution, workaround. Boot the previous kernel and you should be OK.