[lug] SUSE- comments

[Deva Samartha]

>friendly is in the eye of the beholder.  Perhaps, they've improved on it
>...?

Yast interface has changed significantly since 6.1. 6.4 introduced 
graphical (X) interface Yast 2 which I experienced as in need of ironing 
out bugs.

In 7.0 the bugs were gone (as far as I can see).  It offers a default 
setting for the novice user and a deeper interface for the "prof". I find 
it pretty slick.  Yast 1 (curses based) is accessible by killing the X 
under Yast 2 during installation.

I need Yast 1 sometimes off the boot CD/floppy and the newer distributions 
come up in Yast 2.  Do Ctl-Alt-BS and you are back in Yast 1 (here, I know 
installation mode only, never using Yast 2 when system is up).


>The SuSE system was equally confusing to me.  Lots of screens with options
>that didn't make a lot of sense to me.  Installing a single software
>package (say Octave) as opposed to an entire software category (math) via
>the gui interface in either SuSE or Red Hat always seems to be difficult

one can "drill down" in SuSE to the individual package. You can also get 
the rpm, source rpm and do it from the commandline on everyone of those levels.

But, as I hear, Debian seems to be superior having more automatism to upgrades.

> > Now,.. the real challange.. go through the kernel and try not to break
> > anything, and get it the way I like it. Along with an extra driver or
> > two....
>
>Don't get me wrong.  I did run SuSe at home for a year or so.  It is nice
>in its own way.  The biggest problem I had with it was a continual fight
>between me and YAST.  YAST wants things configured its own way, and I
>sometimes wanted to change this.  You had to be careful that if you made a
>change to the system configuration outside of YAST, that the next time you
>ran YAST it wouldn't simply trash the changes you had previously made.

if you change configuration, like /etc/rc.config, you need to run
/sbin/SuSEconfig

otherwise with the next run of Yast your changes are undone.

That was written in the file /etc/rc.config until a couple of releases ago, 
now this hint has disappeared, but one can disable the SuSEconfig 
altogether by setting a flag in rc.config:

# Please don't contact our support if you have trouble configuring your
# system after having disabled SuSEconfig.  (yes/no)
#
ENABLE_SUSECONFIG=yes

I live with SuSE since 5.1 and it boils down to this:

Basic things - adding users, network cards, printers, upgrading, installing 
can be done nicely in Yast (1). It is helpful for "deeper" stuff, like 
multiple network cards, firewall but you gotta know (or learn) what you are 
doing and make a backup of every conf file before you change it and after 
you change it.

One can run system upgrades over the internet - I did it a for a while but 
not any more because things may break.

For upgrades, I wait for their next release, copy my harddisk, upgrade and 
cross my fingers, if it fails, use the old version on the other harddisk or 
install from scratch.

Earlier ( pre SuSE ), I did upgrades to stay near the bleeding edge and 
found the keeping up of versions, libraries, getting all the stuff together 
and working is a major pain.

With SuSE, I buy the upgrades and cross my fingers. Their releases are 
often one version behind and their rpm's  and kernel are tailored to their 
distribution. Security upgrades and bug fixes can either be automatically 
installed (internet) or manually downloaded and installed with Yast or from 
the commandline.

Before deciding on a distribution (2+ years back), I evaluated RH, SuSE and 
Caldera with SuSE coming out ahead on user interface, online support 
database and installation. Redhat would not install, Caldera had a poor 
desktop. SuSE appeared mature in comparison.

Doing the same thing now, maybe I would use Debian, BSD for system stuff - 
web/mail/proxy/firewall server or stick with SuSE, for applications, I 
would chose a distribution which has industry support/acknowledgement but 
for unknown rational reasons, I would stay away from RH.

my 2 cents....

Samartha