I recently installed SuSE 7.1 and have been trying to figure out how patching, updating, and installing relate to one another and to the facilities in Yast1 and Yast2: The URL for patching is "http://www.suse.com/en/support/download/updates/71_i386.html". That page contains a list of package names and descriptions of why they need to be updated. The URL for updating is "ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse_update/7.1/". It contains a partial list of disk collections (a1, a2, etc.). The URL for installing is "ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/7.1/suse/". It appears to contain all disk series for the entire system. Interestingly, the installation page does not contain the kernel collection ("kernel") to be found on the updating page. Another puzzle is that all the directories on the installation page are dated March 16, while those on the update page have various dates, some earlier, some later. Nowhere have I seen any explanation about how the three pages relate to one another or the purposes to which each should be put. Both Yast1 and Yast 2 have facilities for updating and installing; Yast2 also has a facility for online patching, which goes (I believe) to the patch page. But the URLs for patching and for installing are different (as shown above). Yast1 doesn't seem to have any facility for patching. I can't see how to set the URL for updating in Yast2, although it can be done in Yast1 through the FTP option of "install packages". Both Yast2 and Yast1 seem to have analogous operations for setting the URL for installing. To add to the confusion, one form of updating is to do a selective installation, installing newer packages only. And I haven't even looked into what's available on the German ftp site. Can someone make sense of all of this for me? For instance, how does one do an update (based on the update page) in Yast2? Paul Abrahams