Zenworks

Yay for Zenworks on SuSE RC2!

I previously mentioned that rug and Zenworks in SuSE beta 8 was a great addition, but not quite there yet.

It also wasn’t there in Beta9. Then it occurred to me: the SuSE ‘factory’ is a yum repository. So, I successfully upgraded from beta9 to beta10 with yum. Everything went smoothly.

Now, it was time to trying upgrading to factory (which I believe was rc2 at the time). I manually installed libzypp, zmd, libzypp-zmd-backend from factory. Then I deleted everything from /var/lib/zmd and /var/lib/zypp, as well as /var/cache/zmd.

Then:

/etc/init.d/novell-zmd restart

rug sa http://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/suse factory
rug sa http://mirrors.kernel.org/suse/install/10.1/inst-source-extra/suse factory-e
rug sa --type=zypp http://packman.unixheads.com/suse/10.1/ packman

rug sub factory
rug sub factory-e
rug sub packman

rug update

Everything went right along. All deps were resolved, all packages were downloaded (1 GB total), and the rpms were beginning to be installed. zmd quit at about 40% of the installation transaction, but the backend transaction finished until completion. I’m not sure what’s going on there.

Anyway, much progress, and I’m counting on rug/zmd being usable. The memory leaks have been fixed, but the process of adding repositories, refreshing, adding packages, and removing packages is still too slow. This taxes my 2 Ghz mobile chip way too much. Hopefully some further improvements will be made.

The cool thing about zmd is that it supports several repository formats:

wberrier@wberrier:~> rug st

Alias    | Name     | Description
---------+----------+--------------------------------------------
yum      | YUM      | A service type for YUM servers
zypp     | ZYPP     | A service type for ZYPP installation source
nu       | NU       | A service type for Novell Update servers
rce      | RCE      | A service type for RCE servers
zenworks | ZENworks | A service type for Novell ZENworks servers
mount    | Mount    | Mount a directory of RPMs

Congrats to the people working on Zenworks and zypp and I’m looking forward to further improvements.