4.2. Workflow for the Vendor Update

The Vendor Update workflow consists of the following steps

• The User clicks on the Vendor CD Button in YaST

• When started, the Vendor Update CD module of YaST tries to mount /dev/cdrom on /var/adm/mount. If it fails YaST tries to mount /dev/fd0 on /var/adm/mount. If this also fails the user is asked to insert the vendor driver CD.

• After a successful mount, YaST tries to find the correct directory as described above. For a SuSE Linux 8.1 (i386) distribution, YaST would look for the linux/suse/ on the CD. If this fails, the CD is rejected with the message "Couldn't find driver data on the CD-ROM". Then the directory linux/suse/i386-8.1/ is searched. YaST will fail with "CD-ROM data doesn't match running SuSE Linux" if this directory doesn't exist. This and all further error messages will be presented in the correct language the user has choosen at the start of the installation.

• Next, YaST scans the directory for installation script files (files ending with .ins). If no files with extension .ins can be found, YaST rejects the CD with "Couldn't find driver data on the CD-ROM".

• For each installation script file, a matching description file is searched. The match algorithm is described above. If no matching description file can be found, the driver is silently skipped.

• For each driver, the first matching description file is read in and presented to the user in a pop-up window. The window has two buttons, one labled "Yes" the other one labled "No". The button labels will be properly translated by YaST to the correct language.

• If the user clicks on the "No" button, the driver is skipped.

• If the user clicks on the "Yes" button, the installtion script file is copied to the /tmp directory of the running system. This copying is done to prevent errors when executing files from mounted media, which is not normally allowed by default. YaST does a chmod 2774 to the file in order to force read, write, and execute permissions for root. Then the working directory is set to /tmp and the installation script is executed with the full directory path as the argument. There is no automatic mode, the user is asked separately for each Vendor Update.

• YaST evaluates the exit code of the script. If it is non-zero, a popup with the message "Installation failed" is presented to the user.

• After execution, the installation script is removed from /tmp. The script should remove any temporary files that it creates during execution.

• After all .ins files have been processed, YaST present a summary with the number of successfully installed Vendor Updates. If no Vendor Updates could be successfully installed, YaST pops up a message reading "Couldn't find driver data on the CD-ROM".

• As the final step, /var/adm/mount will be unmounted.