YaST/zypper - “bad media attach point”

Just now, I encountered an extremely frustating problem with opensuse 10.2. Having previously worked supporting SuSE Linux, I am a life-long user and fan of SuSE but 10.2 has been a bit of disappointment compared to some earlier versions.

After KDE 3.5.7 had messed up my desktop, I found myself trying to downgrade to fix the issue. Unfortunately, that didn’t go well - the same problem still after reverting back to KDE 3.5.5 and as far as I know I’d reverted all the changes.

So I decided enough messing around with smart (which I’ve had only bad experiences with so far in opensuse 10.2) and switched back to YaST. Unfortunately, both YaST and zypper were throwing up the same error message: “bad media attach point”.

At first I wasn’t too sure, but after watching y2log while trying to open “Installation Source” again I realised (and perhaps it was quite obvious in the first place) the reference was to attach points under /var/tmp. For those of you also experiencing the problem, you should simply be able to clean out the files from /var/tmp and then retry. If your attach points (e.g. directories named “AP_0×00000043″ and similar) aren’t created in /var/tmp then just open up xterm/konsole or your preferred terminal, switch to root (su - or sux -) and execute the command tail -f /var/log/y2log and watch for where YaST tries to create the attach point.

Well, now back to trying to downgrade my system to default. Lesson learnt - stick with the default KDE version and only use SuSE updates or Packman-patched patches.