I want to be able to construct a script such that after I reinstall, I can run it and it’ll setup my firewall, AppArmour, any graphical, etc settings, download and install any apps I want, unzip files, etc.
What are my options?
Quite sure somewhere in Yast Software management there should be an option to export a useful list… however I just tried File > Export … which made an XML that didn’t make much sense.
And rightclick in the list > export this list to text file … which created a basically empty text file.
Try it for yourself, and maybe your yast does a better job 
Nearly all of your program settings are stored in your home folder, if you have this on a different partition (openSUSE does this by default) you just don’t format this partition during the reinstall.
Settings that aren’t stored here are the ones likes your network settings or apache configuration.
If it’s not on seperate partition back it up somewhere, so you can restore it after the reinstall. (most of the settings are stored in hidden folders… so those are the ones you want to back up)
[EDIT:] Right … you wanted to automate it… well now you know where the settings are stored it isn’t big step to write a script that places some files in the right directory. And yast can use the import/export features from commandline as well, so the above info should be of use 
Thanks for the reply!
Yeah, I don’t know if there is a built in function for OpenSUSE that does this, but I’m fine with any good opensource solution.
Hmmm…I don’t like this solution because what I want is to guarantee that I KNOW all settings I’m configuring my computer with. You never know if those files have been tampered with, that’s why I don’t want to just copy/keep those files. I want to have everything reinstalled with the default settings + any important changes I would make to harden the system. That’s why I want a script that I can edit. I want to overwrite the entire hard disk on reinstall.
It is a good starting place, thanks! 
If you don’t tamper with any of the settings in the / partition, then all your settings will be in /home with the exception of mysql. So you only need to save /home to save all your settings.
If you occasionally tamper with files in /, then the easiest way is to save a backup of them in case of a problem or for when you reinstall.
Then write a script simply to restore those files from / that you have edited.