Getting Started in SuSE as an Ubuntu User
- by Subhamoy Sengupta
I am not a Linux newbie, but haven't touched SuSE in a very very long time (last time I tried it, it was SuSE 7!). Finally now I felt like giving it a try, and many things seem strange or unnecessarily complex. I have a series of questions.
How do I ensure that my packages are uptodate? It sounds silly, but I tried the obvious methods already. I have disabled the default repositories that show up when you do zypper lr, and added Tumbleweed and packman repositories (Essentials, Multimedia, Extra). Then I did a sudo zypper ref --force and then sudo zypper dup, and it tells me many dependencies are not met. I have already added solder.allowVendorChange=true to /etc/zypp/zypp.conf, so it should not care which repository the latest versions are in, and just upgrade to it. Even when I chose to skip the packages with unmet dependencies, and seemed like quite a bit happened in the background, I opened Firefox afterwards and the version was 7! I am guessing things did not go as expected. But of course this is not a problem with SuSE, but I am not understanding the system right. How do I do it right?
When I start typing arguments of a command, for example sudo zypper install, when I type sudo zypper ins and keep hitting TAB, nothing happens! It always worked in Ubuntu and I feel very uneasy with this. Is this how SuSE is supposed to be?
When I try to install something, and I start writing its name, even though the package exists and I am sure of it, hitting TAB does not autocomplete it. This is also quite inconvenient. Why is it not happening?
There are many things in SuSE that are really great, and I think I will stay with it and not go back to Ubuntu once I settle these very rudimentary issues. But right now they are giving me a lot of grief! Please help!