Updating the SME in general is pretty straighforward but if the customer made modifications to the yum configuration it can quickly turn into a nightmare. Luckily there is a tutorial available in the SME Wiki which can help you to get started. Unfortunately the yum installation was completly broken so I had to update the packages by hand. I pulled the packages from the SME repository at and installed them via

export SME_MIRROR_URL="http://mirror.jvsnet.ro/sme/releases/7/smeos/i386/SME/RPMS"

wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/dialog-1.0.20040731-3.i386.rpm
wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/python-sqlite-1.1.7-1.2.1.i386.rpm
wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/yum-metadata-parser-1.0-8.el4.centos.i386.rpm
wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/e-smith-formmagick-2.0.0-1.el4.sme.noarch.rpm
wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/smeserver-yum-2.0.0-4.el4.sme.noarch.rpm
wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/yum-plugin-fastestmirror-0.2.4-3.c4.noarch.rpm
wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/e-smith-lib-2.0.0-1.el4.sme.noarch.rpm
wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/sqlite-3.3.6-2.i386.rpm
wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/yum-plugin-installonlyn-0.91-1.el4.sme.noarch.rpm
wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/perl-CGI-FormMagick-0.92-16.el4.sme.noarch.rpm
wget $SME_MIRROR_URL/yum-2.4.3-4.el4.centos.noarch.rpm

rpm -Uvh --nodeps --force *.rpm

You maybe have to adjust this mirror url. This is why I factored it out into a seperate variable.

After this you should reset your yum repositories and clean the yum cache.

cd /home/e-smith/db/
mv yum_repositories yum_repositories.po
/etc/e-smith/events/actions/initialize-default-databases
signal-event yum-modify
yum clean all

After doing so, issue the following commands to let SME rewrite it’s config.

signal-event post-upgrade; signal-event reboot

Now you can update yum through yum itself (I know this sounds strange but this second update helps to get all the GPG keys for the repositories right).

yum update yum
signal-event post-upgrade; signal-event reboot

Now you can proceed with a normal update to get the whole system up to 7.4. I had to do this following process twice because the updates seem to have pulled in some new dependencies which in turn have to get updated.

yum update yum
signal-event post-upgrade; signal-event reboot

That’s it. I’m sure there might be an easier way but at least these are the steps the helped me get the system up to date. If you have questions just leave me a comment.