I’ve found the following irritating problem with the default update applet in 11.4 (the one available in ‘Software Management’ in the KDE system settings):
Applet prompts to update the system, click Apply updates
Accept licence agreement for flash player update
The applet goes back to listing the available updates - ie. it doesn’t run the update
The workaround is to untick the flash player update, run the other updates and then do the flash player update by itself.
Has anyone else seen this or raised a bug about it?
Sometimes it asks you twice for the root password;
sometimes the prompt for the root password is hidden below other windows;
sometimes it does what you describe.
The gnome version is also annoying. It asks for the root password on the window listing the updates. If there are many updates, that window is partly below the bottom of the screen, so you cannot see where you are supposed to enter the root password.
I am finding “online update” in Yast to be far more reliable and more informative. I have disabled kpackagekit update as a startup service. I periodically start it manually, so that I can see if there are updates. If there are, I often close the kpackagekit window and go to Yast to do the updating.
Don’t understand why it does it but if you click ‘Apply’ again everything is installed, including the flash player update. Just an idiosyncracy it appears.
Maybe this is not the place to ask (or rant), but I do not understand the whole idea behind kpackagekit.
Before we had the updater applet. My idea was that it formes part of the whole YaST > Software management/zypper/Updater applet group to manage my openSUSE installed software. Where the applet told me asap when security (and recommended) updates were available. I know that many here didn’t want to use the applet, but it told me about security and that was what I liked. I repeat, my idea was that the applet was integral part of the openSUSE distribution to do package management (for system management) the openSUSE way.
In 11.4 we seem to have a thing called Kpackagemanager, which to me looks like being something from KDE. KDE is a desktop environment suite for the end-user. Also I have the impression that KDE is distribution independent (it seems even to run on Windows versions). Thus I do not understand why
. KDE suplies a tool for doing the system management task of software package management on openSUSE;
. How the KDE people thought they would interface to all the different way of doing package managent in the different distributions/operating systems they seem to cover;
. How the openSUSE distribution packagers thought it would be a good idea to have their openSUSE way of doing this could better be replaced by a new way (which will have a lot of deseases in the beginning) that is dependent on the usage of a particular DE (do all the other DEs also have such an applet?);
. And why doen’t the tool do what it should do: tell me about security updates in the Update repo, instead of telling me about all sorts of new versions in the repos I have.
Now for the last complaint, when you open the applet for configuration, you see all your repos there and it offers you to switch all off except for the Update one. But when you do this, it asks for the root password! I do not understand why a tool that is perfectly able (like the earlier applet) to tell you if there are updates without doing so as root, needs to run as root when you tell it not to show all of that information. I did not take the risk to provide the root password, but if anybody knows why it needs it, that would be interesting.
Well I’ve only recently decided to switch to using kpackagekit. Before I was using the old automatic YAST online update configuration that places a script in /etc/cron.daily for you. If you haven’t been using this install the package yast2-online-update-configuration and see it appear in YAST.
Anyway I wanted to try kpackagekit because it looked nice how you could click each update and see the info on it, and also because it tells you when you need to reboot or logout or close programs after an update. With the silent /etc/cron.daily/ script you only know when you need to do this when you start getting weird errors.
As for PackageKit in general I actually think it’s an extremely good idea. It basically functions as a standard interface for installing or removing packages, and has backends that deal with yum, zypp, urpmi, apt or whatever. It’s been very useful for example in some of the media players, since instead of giving a cryptic message ‘codec XX is not installed’ or ‘libencodeXX.so not found’ some of the players now call PackageKit which calls zypper to install the right package.
Having a standard cross-distribution update applet is also a good idea, but as my experience shows it’s not quite ready at this time Maybe in 12.1?
You have read my post and thus will not be amazed that I am not with you on all your points.
I do (and did) not want to be updated anything automatic because:
I want to check the description (you seem to value that as a positive for Kpacketmaner, but the old applet had it and the same for the advice to reboot);
I do not want to take any update (and particulary a kernel update) to take place when any user (including me) is loged in and uses any application like typing this post or working with a bank account.
Thus the old applet perfectly filled my needs.
And as you have read in my other post I do not think it a good idea when every DE tries to make an application that fits all sorts of package management for all sorts of OSes. Even if they get it right at one moment in time (which Kpacketmanaer hasn’t atm) next moment e.g. the YaST/zypper developers may come which something new and I doubt that KDE, Gnome and all the others will have a changed package manager ready in time. In short, I do not believe that this is going to work.
I used and valued the applet. An applet that I removed from all users except my own one because I am also the system manager. It hen warned me for realy important things: Security updates. It then let me assess the items there for importance and impact and thus let me decide if they realy should be implemented on some or all systems asap.
Normal updates, like an application on Packman that has a tiny change I most probably will never experience, I do once a week when all systems have there maintanance. I do not want to be pestered by these updates as if they were as important as security patches.
As Kpacketmanager is now it does not fullfill my wishes and when I try to bend it a little bit in the direction I want, it aks for the root pasword which I do not understand at all. It makes me suspicuous.
Packagekit only handles common, basic use cases though - ‘install a package’ or ‘install updates’. The more advanced stuff or more fine-grained control is always going to be in the distro-specific tools, but that won’t stop packagekit handling the common stuff such as installing a codec package requested by an app or installing updates.
I used and valued the applet. An applet that I removed from all users except my own one because I am also the system manager. It hen warned me for realy important things: Security updates. It then let me assess the items there for importance and impact and thus let me decide if they realy should be implemented on some or all systems asap.
Normal updates, like an application on Packman that has a tiny change I most probably will never experience, I do once a week when all systems have there maintanance. I do not want to be pestered by these updates as if they were as important as security patches.
As Kpacketmanager is now it does not fullfill my wishes and when I try to bend it a little bit in the direction I want, it aks for the root pasword which I do not understand at all. It makes me suspicuous.
To be fair it’s good that it asks for the root password before doing anything, since users who can’t install software through YAST/zypp also aren’t able to through packagekit.
I agree it’s not as flexible as the native distro tools though, and unfortunately seems to be buggy
To be fair it’s good that it asks for the root password before doing anything, since users who can’t install software through YAST/zypp also aren’t able to through packagekit.
I think you misunderstood me.
When I ask it to install software it of course asks for the root password, else it couldn’t do it.
But I configure it and uncheck a few repos in the list to achieve that it does not check those repos and does consequently not show me about newer software on those repos. Now it does not even need root priviliges to check (as you must now because it shows you those things without asking you for the root password). Then why asks it for the root password if I only tell it NOT display some of those updates?
I just started Kpackagekit because I wanted to make a picture of this to show you. But I am getting the eary ideaa that Kpacketmanager is wanting todo the same things as YaST Software management and that it in the case I mention is trying to make the repo inactive! THat is of course the last thing I want. Medling with my YaST/zypper data!
But I configure it and uncheck a few repos in the list to achieve that it does not check those repos and does consequently not show me about newer software on those repos. Now it does not even need root priviliges to check (as you must now because it shows you those things without asking you for the root password). Then why asks it for the root password if I only tell it NOT display some of those updates?
I think you misunderstood what that UI is for - it’s configuring the software repositories, not filtering the KPackagekit UI list.
Packagekit is just a distribution-agnostic layer on top of zypp (or yum in Fedora, apt in Debian etc.) so if you disable a repo through Packagekit it’s really doing it through zypp anyway. It’s the same as if you’d manually run ‘zypper mr -d REPO’.
The alternative, that Packagekit maintains it’s own list of enabled/disabled repos that diverges from YAST/zypp is exactly what you don’t want as it essentially creates another package management system on your machine.
As I said before it’s definitely not as flexible as the native tools - it’s all or nothing, no way to just tell it to pull in security updates.
Yes, I may have expressed myself a little unprecise in my last lines above. But I indeed found now out that it tries to emulate what we have allready for years: YaST > Software management. That I could not think of in my wildest imagination. Such a useles spoiling of programming efforts. And I completely miss why this is installed by default in the openSUSE distribution. Everybody knows that YaST is the central system management tool for openSUSE. Much of openSUSE’s appeal comes from YaST. And now they are throwing in a new tool that tries to mimic the software management part of YaST:question:
I have allready deinstalled Kpackagemanager. Maybe I should deinstall the underlyiing package manager packages also.
But I still does not bring my openSUSE update applet back :disapointed:
I left it there. I just removed it as an automatic startup service. So now it doesn’t do anything unless I start it manually.
I still find it useful to start manually. That gives me a list of what it thinks should be updated, though with none of them preselected. Then I can still choose to go to online update if I see something that needs to be done. And Yast no longer tells me that it is being blocked by packagekit.
YaST serves me perfectly in showing where there are newer versions for. So I do not need another tool. I hope YaST software manager will not be depricated becaue of this newcomer.
But I want a warning for Security updates. The only alternative I see is watching the Novell SUSE Security anouncements (with RSS) and then go into YaST the next day. But with the uncoming spliiting up I do not know how long this will function.
In any case I learned from this thread that the new applet is not just a replacement for the old applet with some aspects I did not understand. It is now clear to me that I misunderstood the whole thing (did I miss some documentation, is this regression in the readme?).
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> But I still does not bring my openSUSE update applet back :disapointed:
>
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Install kupdateapplet, I cannot promise how it works in 11.4 but it is
available, I will test it right now. Tired of kpackagekit (I gave it many
chances over last months).
–
PC: oS 11.3 64 bit | Intel Core2 Quad Q8300@2.50GHz | KDE 4.6.3 | GeForce
9600 GT | 4GB Ram
Eee PC 1201n: oS 11.4 64 bit | Intel Atom 330@1.60GHz | KDE 4.6.3 | nVidia
ION | 3GB Ram
The idea of PackageKit is not to replace YAST/zypp, which would be impossible since PackageKit is itself just an interface to zypp. I’ve seen this in the Mandriva forums when discussing PackageKit - people get this idea that it will somehow replace the distro’s native package management software, when really it’s just an interface to it. Are there any rumours among the Opensuse developers that they’re going to stop maintaining YAST->Software Management?
The kupdateapplet itself uses PackageKit as the default backend (Kupdateapplet - openSUSE), same as KPackageKit.
Not to mention that with PackageKit we’re finally at the point where programs have a clean, standardised interface to request the installation of packages. I’ve seen it working when trying to watch some WMV and MPEG4 videos off the net which had slightly weird codecs. In the old days the browser plugin (gecko or totem or whatever is default on 11.4) would have just spit out some useless error message about a missing codec. Now it fires up PackageKit and asks you if you want to install the missing codec, and it actually works. Finally we’re in the 21st century!
My very short first reaction (thus no deep though on it) to this “21st century” feature. It is fine, but an standard interface layer should then startup YaST Software manager on an openSUSE system and the native package manager on other distributions. It should use what is already there, not reinvent all wheels.
It does, it uses zypp to actually do anything. Making the YAST GUI package manager work as part of PackageKit would require extensive re-work to the YAST GUI package manager, completely wasted work when zypp and its libraries are there already and designed to be the API to the package management system. Not to mention, this would have to be repeated for every different distro with a GUI package management interface too, and maintained.
So PackageKit has a fairly simple GUI which covers common use cases - installing software and updating the system. It doesn’t conflict with the distro’s native GUI package manager at all and means that finally people can write documentation and tell users a consistent way to do basic package management tasks. Unless there are plans to deprecate the YAST->Software Management GUIs then there’s nothing wrong with having PackageKit’s GUI there too. It’s long past time we had some cross-distribution consistent ways of doing desktop tasks.
I see what you mean. But it should then work flawless (which it doesn’t if I see the threads here). And (a usual Linux drawback) there isn’t much documentation about when to use what. And comes out of the blue sky. The only thing I see after updating to 11.4 is a new icon that says something about “update applet” which let me think that they simply changed the icon design and that that is my valued “Security update alert applet”. It is thus a major regression to me.
In any case, I for myself would always search for a software management tool in the systems central system management tool, which is YaSt in openSUSE and something else in Solaris, and again something else in RedHat or HP. And thus I did not notice this Kpackagekit interface to a packagekit layer to zypper at all after starting running 11.4.
I know I am a bad adaptor of new things, especialy as the old ones still function better.
I see where you’re coming from - a lot of the new technologies in the Linux world are shoved in by distros when they’re really only alpha or beta quality, without waiting for them to mature to a production level (eg. Pulse Audio, KDE4.0-4.2, grub2 in Debian/Ubuntu and so on). However I don’t agree that KpackageKit as the update applet instead of kupdateapplet is a major regression, especially since they are both PackageKit frontends.
Besides for the irritating little bug I reported in this thread (which is easily worked around) and the slow ‘Refreshing Package Lists’ there’s nothing stopping KPackageKit from updating your system - it does get the job done.
Besides for the irritating little bug I reported in this thread (which is easily worked around) and the slow ‘Refreshing Package Lists’ there’s nothing stopping KPackageKit from updating your system - it does get the job done.
But it shouldn’t, it should only alert me when there is a Security update (the Update repo).
I do not want to be updated at all. I want a stable system. Never touch a running system. Security is important and for the rest it should stay as it is until I go to a next openSUSE level.
Maybe in 12.1? 
