Comment # 3 on bug 987774 from Michael Andres

Whether you actually need root privilege to access the repositories very much
depends on your configuration. If your repos were refreshed at least once (as
root), repo metadadta are already cached on disk and there is no urgent need to
actually access the media.

If you use 'zypper --no-refresh ...', zypper will use the cached metadata on
disk and not try to access the media.

Without '--no-refresh' zypper will check, whether the cached metadata are still
up-to-date, if the repo has 'autorefresh' turned on (use 'zypper lp' to check).
This will indeed try to access the media and might fail, if your system does
not allow this as non-root user. But this is intended.



If you are using an 'immutable' mounted media (like this .iso), you can turn
off 'autorefresh' for it (zypper mr -R <REPO>). Whenever you replace the .iso
file by a new version, you need to refresh the repo once as root to update the
disk cache (zypper ref -f <REPO>). 
With 'autorefresh' turned off, 'zypper lp/lu' should not try to access the
media (provided the metadata are cached on disk).


(If this does not resolve your problem, reopen the bug, run as user
'ZYPP_LOGFILE=/tmp/myzypper.log zypper lu' and attach the log file)