[ale] zypper vs yast2 vs rpm installs on SLES/Open Suse

[allen at ua.edu (Beddingfield, Allen)]

"rpm -ivh file.rpm" attempts the installation, but gives no dependency resolution beyond telling you which dependencies are missing.

"yast -i file.rpm" will attempt dependency resolution

"yast sw_single" will give a menu driven system to search, install, remove, etc..  packages from installed packages and available repos.

zypper is a commandline utility that can be used to do most everything that the above menu driven system can do (zypper search, zypper list-updates, zypper install, zypper update, etc..)

Allen B.

--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
The University of Alabama
________________________________
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [ale-bounces at ale.org] on behalf of Narahari 'n' Savitha [savithari at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2013 8:04 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
Subject: [ale] zypper vs yast2 vs rpm installs on SLES/Open Suse

Friends:

What is the difference between

zypper

yast2

yast

rpm

based installs ?

When to use what and what are pure command line options ?

For example if Firewall had to allow certain services I could not do it in one line.  I had to navigate menus to do it.

Also comparing to Ubuntu, there are the regular repos and the ppa's.  Isnt there a similar concept in SLES / Open SUSE ?

Can we mix and match repos between SLES and OpenSuse ? and what about between minor version say between 11.1 and 11.4 ?

-Narahari