ksmarttray and updates

[Stephen Boddy]

On Friday 04 August 2006 15:34, Randy Smith wrote:
> I'm using Smart with opensuse 10.1.  Two issues--

Same setup.

> (1) When using the command line interface, "smart config show xxxx"
> never displays any information for any option-- I simply get a blank
> line back.  Is this a bug or am I doing something incorrect.

You appear to have missed out the -- (double dash) before the --show.

> (2) When running ksmarttray as non-root, if I right-click on the icon
> and select "check" or if I hover over the icon, ksmarttray never reports
> that updates are available.  If I click on the icon, then I am asked for
> the root password and the cache is loaded, but again there are no updates.

Try running smart-update as a normal user. This is the command that ksmarttray 
actually runs. You, like me, will probably get:
	error: Configuration is in readonly mode.
This is because as a regular user you cannot write to the folder/files that 
smart uses (/var/lib/smart). There was another guy (Basil, I think) on the 
SuSE list that swears this all works for him without running ksmarttray as 
root, but I cannot understand how he has managed this.

> On the flip side, if I log in as root and click on ksmarttray, it will
> check the repositories and tell me that updates are available.
>
> So, the issue seems to be that sync with repositories does not happen in
> non-root mode.  Is this the normal behavior for Smart or can I change it
> somehow?

Due to the above, no. My workaround is to leave ksmarttray working as a normal 
user, and add the following entries to root's crontab:

@reboot         nice smart update > /dev/null 2>&1
24 */4 * * *    nice smart update > /dev/null 2>&1

This means it runs an update at boot, and every 4 hours at 24 minutes past the 
hour.

I'm still not convinced yet that ksmarttray spots updates reliably. It does 
blink, but often that's after I've interfered somehow. Ksmarttray checks 
every 5 minutes to see how long ago the last update was. If it is more than 
60 minutes, it performs an update.

HTH
-- 
Steve Boddy