This seems pretty basic, but a friend of mine tried this and got an error, and I duplicated it -- he has gone off and tried a "third party" version of "you", and I've kludged a workaround, but the fact that it is (was) a problem is still annoying. Basically, in SuSE's help database there is an entry that says (in effect) create the following (root) crontab: MAILTO="<wherever>" 30 9 * * 0 /sbin/yast2 online_update .auto.get 0 10 * * 0 /sbin/yast2 online_update .auto.install Unfortunately, with version 8.1, this fails with "unknown terminal" -- it seems that (n)curses fails to initialize, so the whole thing bombs out (even though the ".auto..." would imply little or no need for a curses/terminal output) the "kludge" I've implemented is to add the line TERM="dumb" to my crontab file, which appears to work (the cron job doesn't "fail" with "unknown terminal" anymore) but at the same time, doesn't actually show that it has "done" something -- the only thing displayed now is: [lots of spaces] YaST @ bigbro (ui-ncurses-2.6.21) it would be "kind of nice...." if auto.get displayed the patch info files retrieved, and if "auto.install" actually listed the (new) packages/patches actually applied -OR- a "nothing new at this time" message ============ As it turns out, I had added a package that "required" a common file that had ALREADY been patched to a later version. It appears the install program back-dated the common package to the earlier version, and the "cron'd" auto get/install routines did NOT fix it up -- even worse, trying to update it manually shows the package with a newer "available" version than what is "installed", but "greyed out" as "patch already installed/applied" -- I cannot select/deselect/reselect the package for updating...