On the premise that the chief reason for buying CDs (other than being nice, of course) is to be able to do a "slap it in and have it all" installation; and given that there are now a number of downloadable security patches for 8.0; and given that SuSE seems to have pretty good revision control:
Are the CD box sets labeled in such a way as to indicate what date the software therein is patched up to
SuSE doesn't change the CDs of a distribution once it's out. The amount of updates available for 8.0 exceeds 1 CD by a long shot, partly due to the fact that KDE was updated completely 3 times, and partly due to the fact that each single update is offered as normal .rpm and also as .patch.rpm. I have argued with SuSE before that those .patch.rpm are a waste of time and bandwidth. There is an update CD available for 8.0, but I don't think it has the latest KDE 3.0.2. It's easy to make one yourself: mirror the updates directory from some server, using rsync with these excludes: *kde*-3.0-* *kde*-3.0.1-* kde1/kdemultimedia3.rpm zq1/kdebase3.spm *.patch.rpm (you can save another 100M or so by excluding those KDE translations you don't use) (use --exclude-from). There's an sdb article on how to make a SuSE patch CD (mainly it's keeping the correct directory structure). You can test this with YOU. The difference between calling YOU and patch CD from yast is that the former allows you to specify a disk directory. The disk directory must also have patch CD format. It's easy to keep a number of machines current then, though it's still dog-slow to run ("download" patch info from hard disk, takes aaaages for a few kilobytes, select packages, "download" packages, i.e. copy from disk to same disk, check package signatures, yeah good idea, but of course you've done it already done after download). Oh yes, you need to symlink all .rpm to .patch.rpm as well. IMHO YOU leaves considerable scope for a lot of improvements. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.orcon.net.nz/ Please do not CC list postings to me.