[juneau-lug] YaST2 (was: Re: Next meeting)

  • From: "James Zuelow" <e5z8652@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 18:22:47 -0800


>
> What problems did you have with SuSe? I've thought about Debian, but
the
> install seems complicated, and I haven't had the time to really look
at it
> yet. How is the install for Debian? How's Slack? With Red Hat and
Mandrake
> I've become an RPM junkie.
>
I didn't like the fact that YaST2 is a monolithic admin utility.  The
default install sets up YaST2 to do a lot of configuration file
rewrites, even when it is asked to do something completely different.
My favorite example was installing X-CDRoast from the SuSE CD set.  One
of the disadvantages of having 7 CD's of stuff is that it's hard to find
things manually.  So I fired up YaST2 and installed it (from CD 5 if I
recall correctly).  YaST2 then "repaired" my Postfix main.cf file for
me, using its values instead of the values that were already there.  I
am more familiar with admin tools that go out of their way to *not*
overwrite a user's changes to a file, not one that just assumes it has
the correct values.

I turned that feature off, so that I could use YaST2 to install software
or do system updates without bothering everything else under the sun.
However it wasn't something that gave me a warm fuzzy feeling about
SuSE.

If you feel comfortable using one tool to administer everything on your
box, definately try SuSE.  It is a fairly well polished distribution for
day to day use.  However keep in mind that YaST2 is not all-knowing.
Some parts of my Postfix main.cf file were left alone by YaST2 - those
parts that it didn't know about (meaning I could not set them from
within YaST2 if I wanted to).  I did some looking around and there are
actually quite a few YaST2 modules that are like that.  So once you get
beyond a basic level of competency, YaST2 becomes more of a hindrance
than a help.

The Debian install isn't that bad.  You have to partition your hard
drive manually.  You have to know what equipment you have installed, and
what modules they need (network and sound cards in particular).  You
have to know what your ISA cards are set to as far as IRQ and IO
address.  However a lot of this information is available to you just by
jumping to another virtual terminal and looking at the information
available in /proc or dmesg.

If you install it, you'll like apt-get a lot more than rpm.  It's a more
robust tool that handles dependencies a lot better, and has little
tricks like letting you search the packages you *haven't* installed yet.
That's very cool when you want to do something but don't know which
package to install.

However there are things that Debian doesn't do very well.  There's no
Debian equivalent of RedHat's sndconfig for example.  You'll become more
familiar with doing things by hand if you use Debian.

I've only done one test install of Slack, and it's even less automatic
than Debian.  In fact there's a big Readme on the install CD that tells
you what to do if your installation doesn't work when you reboot.  :)
You'll definately get used to doing things by hand if you run Slack.

Cheers,

James


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