I recently installed (as opposed to an update) 11.0 on a system at home. Since then, I seem to see problems involving the package system.

First problem:

Error boxes appear whenever the screen saver closes after entering the password. The text in the message window is:
Second problem:

More often than not, I'll fire up YaST and try and install some package and get an error about a process already using the package database. A quick "ps -ef" shows that a process "packagekitd" is running for a long time. (I just issued a "kill -1" on one that was running for around two hours.) If I kill the packagekitd process and issue "zypper verify" it doesn't seem to find anything amiss.

Q: Just how often does packagekitd need to run? It seems to want to run several times a day based on the number of times it prevented me from running the software management function in YaST today.

Anyone know what is causing either of these events?

TIA...

--
Rick

What happens if you disable packagekitd (You can always check for updates manually).

I would find a manual update process quite acceptable since I'm a regular reader of LWN and always take a look at the daily security updates. I'm not configuring any of the OpenSUSE boxes to automatically update themselves. But all of the new 11.0 boxes are experiencing this to varying degrees. One system had three of those dialog boxes stacked up behind the browser window when I came back from running an errand.

But... just how do I disable that process from firing up? I cannot find anything about it other than the mostly meaningless information one gets by issuing "/usr/sbin/packagekitd -?".

If I want to disable this, what configuration file controls how this process is being run? Or is this something I can get control over via the YaST system services option? All I get when I look for references to "packagekitd" under /etc is a bunch of Gnome gconf files. (Something's starting to smell like a Registry to me and make me miss Slackware.)

--
Rick

I'll gladly RTFM when I can find the FM.

I have found out a bit more info about your problem. Its caused by the software updater (which uses packagekitd) and if you disable it from your panel, hopefully your problem will be resolved.

I'll try that. Thanks.

Does that stop the notifications about new updates?

--
Rick

If the update notifier pops up, you can right click on it and in the preferences, set the option to check for updates to "never".

That's one way, I suppose, to keep the dead/hung packagekitd process from sticking around in memory. It'd be nice if that process would exit when it was done as I would expect it's supposed to. That way my YaST->Software Management sessions wouldn't get the error box pop up when I'm adding new software from a console session and jumping back and forth between that and the X session where I'm writing/browsing/etc.

This got fixed in 11.1 I'll bet.