Upgrading KDE to 3.2 on SuSE using YaST
I though the rest of you might be interested in this, particularly since there's a major glitch that seems to have hit a bunch of people.
This is based on SuSE 9.0, but also applies to several older versions.

First, find a source that has the "yast-source" directory in it.  I used:

ftp.oregonstate.edu, which has
"pub/suse/suse/i386/supplementary/KDE/update_for_9.0/yast-source/"

You want to point to the folder that has the "media.1" folder directly under it.

Becasue the mirrors are pretty heavily loaded, I mirrored the packages (not the source) to a local folder.  

Launch YaST, and choose Software/Change Source of Installation.  Click "Add" and fill in the relevant information.  You may have to mess around with whether to include the leading "pub", and whether to include a leading or trailing slash.  What's above worked for me.  When you get it right, you
should see "adding installation source", which should take a while even for a local mirror.  If you get "unable to create...", try again and mess with the path a bit.  You should get errors within about thirty seconds, a successfull add over FTP will take several minutes - like five or ten.

Once you've added your source, make sure your original install source is enabled (and available).  Click close.  Now, from the YaST Control Center, choose "System Update".  If you have good original and new sources, you should see an "Installation Settings" page, one the most likely says "requires manual intervention" under "Packages".  This should be the only item in red, otherwise something is not right.

You can accept the defaults here, or take some time customizing and trimming.  Once you're satisfied with the package selections, and have passed dependency checks, you should be able to click Accept, then Next.  One word of caution - there are conflicts with upgrading kdebase.*  You must upgrade this package,
so do whatever is required to fix this.  My first two systems both failed to upgrade kdebase, but I was able to simply go back to the "Install and Remove Software" application, search for "kdebase", and set the results to "Upgrade" (lightning bolt icon).  On my third system I was much more careful resolving conflicts, but I still had to go back and update kdebase manually.

*Rich Edelman  commented:
"To be a little more specific, kdebase3-3.2.0-whatever.rpm conflicts with
kdebase3-SuSE, which is the SuSE icons, wallpapers, and some other things
(including the proper rc files to enable you to use krpmviewer when browsing
a webpage). The only things that actually really conflict are the rc files
that set up konqueror and krpmviewer to play nice together, so you can ignore
this conflict if you want, as long as you find those files and remove them."

I've found that I have both the kdebase3 files on all three systems and they work pretty well so far.

Note appended February 29, 2004: A number of packages have proved to have problems. This includes the loss of icons in the default "crystal" icon theme due to a change in format, and the loss of all icons for Gnome software. Auto-login is broken, and there are problems with kweather. The KDE team appears to be quite frustrated and short-tempered about it, as most of the problems seem to be the result of mistakes made by the people who created the packages for Mandrake, KDE, and Gentoo. (I didn't think Gentoo used packages, but...) SuSE has not been forthcoming with new packages in spite of acknowledging the errors. Aparently the fact the problems can be overcome by installing from source files is supposed to be good enough. So much for package management.

I have not come up with a solution for the icon problem, but there is a work-around for the autologin bug: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=68331#c18 summarizes it as follows:

Comment #18 From abrahams@acm.org 2004-02-05 21:14 -------
Your suggestion in #17 did the trick. For the benefit of others who are following this conversation, here's my take on the recipe:

1. Look in the directory /etc/pam.d for files named "kde", "xdm", or "kdm".

2. Assuming you find the file "kde", do the following:

cd /etc/pam.d
(echo "auth sufficient pam_permit.so"; cat kde) > kde-np

If instead you find "xdm" or "kdm", replace "kde" by one of those in two places in the second line above.

I note that solving this problem exposed another one, already reported: if both automatic login and password-less login are activated, the keymappings don't work properly on auto-login: the Win key is not recognized. Doing a normal login, with or without password, is the workaround.

Note that you will need to use "xdm" instead of "kde" in the above examples when fixing SuSE.

- posted by Jonathan Hutchins @ 1:09 PM 0 comments