OpenSUSE Smart HOWTO

This article will tell you how to install SMART as an alternative to SUSE 10.1 own packagemanger/update system.

Smart has two requirements, besides python (that should be always installed by default anyway), that's rpm-python (RPM bindings for python) and python-elementtree (an API for quick access to XML parsing).

Neither are installed by default, so you will have to pull them down first.

Let's assume that your current zmd/yast2 setup isn't working correctly, and do it the low-level way. After opening a shell and having switched to the root user, do this to install the rpm-python and python-elementtree packages from Factory: for 32 bit systems:

rpm -ihv

rpm -ihv

(note that the whole command is supposed to be a single line, just splitted for the sake of readability, but you can still copy/paste those lines as they are in a root shell)

for 64 bit systems:

Note that if you have a 64bit system (the command "uname -m" shows "x86_64"), then use the following commands instead:

rpm -ihv

rpm -ihv

Installing smart

Now that we have rpm-python installed, let's grab smart

Go to one of these:

   * 

   * 

   * 

(the latter should be the fastest)

And pick the URL of the latest smart package for 10.1 and your architecture (i686 or x86_64), e.g. this one for 32bit:

Or this one for 64bit:

Pass that to rpm -ivh in a root shell, like this for 32 bit:

rpm -ihv

or like this for 64bit:

rpm -ihv

From release 0.41-24 and 0.42-1 onwards, my smart RPM comes pre-configured with all the channels you need (main repository, online updates, non-OSS repository, my own "guru" repository, packman, ...), including the correct repository URLs and mirrors for 10.1.

Another nice tutorial can be found here, written by sPiN:

Post installation

After installing smart, you have to run smart update once to have it download the metadata for the configured repositories. When you run it the first time, it will prompt you on whether you want to include preconfigured channels or not (it asks for every channel). Note that as of version/release 0.41-25 (or 0.42-*) on, the package also includes preconfigured channels for the latest wine, firefox/thunderbird/... updates and the supplementary KDE repository, but those are disabled by default.

From there on, if you also want to install the graphical user interface for smart: smart update

smart install smart-gui

If you also want to enable e.g. the supplementary KDE repository, do this: smart channel --enable suse-kde

smart update suse-kde

You get a list of all configured channels with the following command: smart channel --show