rug provides a wide range of useful information. Check the status of zmd with rug, view registered services and catalogs, or see information about available patches.

If the zmd daemon is not used for a certain period of time, it can be switched to sleep mode. To check the zmd status and reactivate the daemon, use rug ping. The command wakes up zmd and logs status information of the daemon.

To see your registered services, use rug sl. If you want to add a new service and you are not sure which services are supported on your system, use rug st.

To check for available patches, use rug pch. To view information about a patch, enter rug patch-info patch.

By default, a newly installed system is subscribed to several services. To add a new service, use rug sa URI service_name. Replace service_name with a meaningful and unique string that identifies the new service. Information about additional installation sources is provided at http://en.opensuse.org/Installation_Sources.

To install a package from any subscribed catalogs, use rug in package_name. To install from a selected catalog only, add --entire-catalog and the catalog to install use to the command. View information about a package with rug if package_name.

To remove a package, use rug rm package_name. If other packages depend on this package, rug displays their names, versions, and types. Confirm removal of the package.

One of the biggest advantages of rug is user management. Normally only root can update or install new packages. With rug, you can distribute the right to update the system to other users and restrict them, for example, only to updating without the possibility to remove software. Privileges you can grant are:

To give a user permission to update the system, use the command rug ua username upgrade. Replace username with the name of the user. To revoke the privileges of a user, use command rug ud username. To list users with their rights, use rug ul.

To change the current privileges of a user, use rug ue username. Replace username with the name of the desired user.

The edit command is interactive. It lists privileges of the selected user and gives a prompt. Enter the plus (+) or minus (-) symbol and the name of the privilege. Then press Enter. For example, to permit the user to delete software, enter +remove. To save and quit, press Enter at a blank prompt.

Using rug, the system can be updated automatically (for example, by scripts). The simplest example is a fully automatic update. To do this, configure a cron job as root that executes rug up -y. The up -y option downloads and installs the patches from your catalogs without confirmation.

If you instead want only to download the patches then select the patches for installation at a later time, use rug up -dy. The up -dy option downloads the patches from your catalogs without confirmation and saves them to the rug cache. The default location of the rug cache is /var/cache/zmd.

rug is customized through a set of preferences. Some of them are preconfigured during installation. To list the preferences available, use rug get. To edit a preference, enter rug set preference. For example, adjust settings if you need to update your system through a proxy. Before downloading the updates, send your username and password to the proxy server. To do so, use the commands:

rug set proxy-url url_path
rug set proxy-username name
rug set proxy-password password

Replace url_path with the name of your proxy server. Replace name with your username. Replace password with your password.

For more information about updating from the command line, enter rug --help or see the rug(1) man page. The --help option is also available for all rug commands. If, for example, you need help for rug update, enter rug update --help. For examples and detailed information, see http://en.opensuse.org/Using_rug.