Red/Open Carpet, keep your SuSE up to date

[swannema]

Since I enjoy Red Carpet so much, I thought I share it here.
Red/Open Carpet is a very elegant way to keep SuSE Linux up-to date, similar to APT, but it has never caused any problems for me unlike APT, which can be distructive if you are not carefull.

From bkoeper:
You can get the Red Carpet RPM's for SUSE 8.2, 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2 (including x86 64 versions for the later two) here:

http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirror...ub/redcarpet2/

You will mainly need the red-carpet, rcd and rug files from the above. rpm -Uvh install all 3 of the referenced files together as the red-carpet RPM depends upon the rcd and rug files. After installation, I always run Red-Carpet as root from a terminal by typing "red-carpet". When first run, the program will ask if you want to connect to a server or "this computer." Chose "this computer." When it asks to start a Red Carpet daemon select "yes."

Next run "Refresh" to allow Red Carpet to see available channels. For 8.2, 9.0 and 9.1 there is a SUSE channel in addition to Ximian related file channels. For 9.2, I select the following channels:

Evolution Snapshot (to get Evolution 2.0.3)
Red Carpet 2 (for Red Carpet updates)
mono
ximian-connector-snapshot (optional if you need it)

Next, many of the files available from ftp.gwdg.de are now available for use thorugh Red Carpet. Information can be found here:

http://www.open-carpet.org

To add the ability to obtain KDE, Mozilla, Packman, Suse people, Suse projects, Wine and X.org files and updates available from ftp.gwdg.de, from the top file menu in Red Carpet select Edit, Services, Add Service and then type the following in the dialog box:

http://open-carpet.org/services.gwdg

When done, you should select Refresh again so Red Carpet will update the available file channels. Then, click Channels and place check marks in the file selections you want to add.
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I had some problems to run the gwdg channel at first, but solved it:

To add the gwdg server I had to run

rug service-add http://open-carpet.org/services/gwdg

in a shell as root.

[John64]

this sounds cool, but what does it actually do for me?

[swannema]

It solve dependencies on the fly. E.g. you choose to install a program and it will automatically select additional needed software or libs.