Command Line Package Installation in OpenSuSE

One of the things I love the most about Debian is apt. It's a great and speedy package manager. Being able to apt-get install from the command line and not have to wait for a heavy UI to come up is a major plus for me. Thats why I was frustrated with OpenSuSE, which we use at work.

First thing first, I think that the OpenSuSE package system is a pig. Yast is a pig. Zypper is a pig. I did, however, find the fastest route to installing via the command line, which I'll share here.

Unless you happen to know the exact name of the package you want to install, you'll need to look it up. The fastest way I've found is using Webpin, a nice online package searcher. Be careful that you are reading from the right repo though. For example, a search on "magick++" returns many packages, including "libMagick++-devel (6.3.5.10)" which, to my Debian eye, looks like the perfect package. It is from an odd repo though, "Results from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/dipe/openSUSE_10.2" and the one I really want, and have access to mind you, is "ImageMagick-Magick++-devel (6.3.0.0)" which is in the main repo "Results from http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/10.2/repo/oss/suse". It's already too complicated, but we soldier on.

With my new, exact, package name in hand, I open up a root command line. The syntax for a zypper install is zypper install [package name] so I do zypper install ImageMagick-Magick++-devel and let it rip. After a ridiculous amount of parsing, it figures out the dependencies and asks me to continue, which I do. You have to babysit it for key managing, I havent figured out how to force "yes" on it. And that is how you use zypper to install on OpenSuSE.

root:~$ zypper install ImageMagick-Magick++-devel

Restoring system sources...

Parsing metadata for 20070918-142944...

Parsing metadata for 20070927-100843...

Parsing metadata for 20070927-100709...

Parsing metadata for 20070918-055437...

Parsing metadata for SUSE-Linux-10.2-Updates...

Parsing RPM database...

Summary:

   [S3:0][package]libxml2-devel-2.6.26-27.pm.1.i586

   [S4:1][package]liblcms-devel-1.15-30.i586

   [S4:1][package]libwmf-gnome-0.2.8.4-24.i586

   [S4:1][package]libwmf-devel-0.2.8.4-24.i586

   [S4:1][package]readline-devel-5.1-55.i586

   [S5:0][package]ImageMagick-Magick++-devel-6.3.0.0-27.6.i586

   [S5:0][package]ImageMagick-devel-6.3.0.0-27.6.i586

Continue? [y/n] y

Downloading: [S4:1][package]liblcms-devel-1.15-30.i586, 141.5 K(490.1 K unpacked)

Installing: [S4:1][package]liblcms-devel-1.15-30.i586

Downloading: [S4:1][package]libwmf-gnome-0.2.8.4-24.i586, 7.7 K(9.6 K unpacked)

Installing: [S4:1][package]libwmf-gnome-0.2.8.4-24.i586

Downloading: [S4:1][package]readline-devel-5.1-55.i586, 137.2 K(376.7 K unpacked)

Installing: [S4:1][package]readline-devel-5.1-55.i586

Downloading: [S4:1][package]libwmf-devel-0.2.8.4-24.i586, 414.1 K(2.7 M unpacked)

Installing: [S4:1][package]libwmf-devel-0.2.8.4-24.i586

Downloading: [S3:0][package]libxml2-devel-2.6.26-27.pm.1.i586, 2.5 M(11.6 M unpacked)

Installing: [S3:0][package]libxml2-devel-2.6.26-27.pm.1.i586

Downloading: [S5:0][package]ImageMagick-devel-6.3.0.0-27.6.i586, 1.5 M(5.6 M unpacked)

Installing: [S5:0][package]ImageMagick-devel-6.3.0.0-27.6.i586

Downloading: [S5:0][package]ImageMagick-Magick++-devel-6.3.0.0-27.6.i586, 193.2 K(939.8 K unpacked)

Installing: [S5:0][package]ImageMagick-Magick++-devel-6.3.0.0-27.6.i586

root:~$