Staticmethod

I’ve been using OpenSuSE for years, and regular SuSE before then. They’ve always been RPM based, which leaves a lot to be desired, and their tool Yast2 for managing software installation has some drawbacks that I can never quite get over.

With that said, it’s really easy to get Smart up and running to do your software management. Smart is a package manager that can manage the RPM system in OpenSuSE and will read from online YaST2 (and other types) repositories. Smart reminds me a lot of Apt, the commands are very similar and it accomplishes the same results pretty much.

If you’re running OpenSuSE, you can get smart from the online build service found at http://software.opensuse.org. You will need to get at least the following two packages:

1. Smart
2. rpm-python

After those are installed (using rpm -Uvh smart...rpm rpm-python...rpm), you can issue the command smart update.

The initial update process will read the current repositories you may have set up with YaST2 and imports them automatically. After the update process is complete, there are a couple basic command you’ll use most often:

• smart search: search takes a search string and will search the repositories for packages that match, returning the package names and descriptions
• smart install: install takes a list of package names to install. Install will also calculate any dependencies and install those as well, prompting you with a complete list before actually installing
• smart update: Updates the local package information with the latest from your online repositories
• smart upgrade: Does a full system upgrade, looking for any newer versions of packages you already have installed, it will prompt you with the complete list and ask for confirmation before continuing
• smart remove: Removes a package and it’s dependencies, will prompt you with a complete list of packages before it continues

Smart is a great tool for doing software management on OpenSuSE, and in my experience much faster than YaST2.