Couple of days ago, while I was updating the KDE4.0.4 install present on my openSUSE, my Internet conked off(as usual), and I was stuck halfway between the KDE4.0.4 -> KDE 4.1.3 update. So I shutdown my system. Later on while powering it on, this semi-update badly damaged by KDE installation with version incompatibilities and DBUS communication failures – resulting that my X server wouldn’t come up, with KDE chosen as the DE. With KDE out, I was trying to figure out how to get it updated, without any GUI tools(generally I rely on YaST2) and then I thought why not try out zypper

With the man page and #openSUSE at Freenode as reference, I managed to get KDE updated using couple of commands.
They were:

zypper refresh

This refreshes the repositories – this will be needed, if you’ve disabled auto-refresh of repositories.

Now that the repos are refresh, upgrade the pacakges by typing

zypper up -t package -r <Name/Alias given to the repo>


That’s it. KDE will be updated to the latest version.
In case you haven’t added the repo, add it by typing

zypper ar -r http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/Factory:/Desktop/openSUSE_Factory -n KDE4_1

This will add an entry to repositories with the name KDE4_1 that you can use in the above zypper command, next to the -r parameter

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