UsedSuse 7.3 Pro for 2 months then gave the machine to Woody

Post #53,298 by scoenye 9/25/02 8:53:24 PM Reply	UsedSuse 7.3 Pro for 2 months then gave the machine to Woody Suse 7.3 turned out to be unmaintainable. The Yast config tools have their fingers in everything, but do not provide access to all options of the programs involved, and not even to all options that Suse does support (there's a meta text config file for that). Manual changes stand a good chance of getting clobbered next time Yast(2) is run. Suse also wrote a meta deamon for pppd which is completely undocumented. This was the final straw as it does a terrible job at providing PPPoE support for anything but the German telco ADSL access. The meta deamon blocks most pppd options, and pppd itself seems to have been modified as well as it no longer works standalone. The much heralded Suse paper docs provide generic Unix and network information, but do not actually provide the necessary info on Suse itself.
Post #53,318 by deSitter 9/26/02 10:10:13 AM Reply	Re: UsedSuse 7.3 Pro... Agreed, however this is not primarily a SuSE issue. The main problem is shared libraries, which are almost as much a problem in Linux as in Windows. As for YaST, I love it for what it's good at, and remove the modules for things I'd rather hand-configure. -drl
Post #53,319 by pwhysall 9/26/02 10:11:57 AM Reply	Eh? What in the blue blazes has shared libraries got to do with the fact that SuSE doesn't bother to document half its stuff yet has a config tool that gets everywhere? More cheese? Peter [link\|http://www.debian.org\|Shill For Hire] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Blog]
Post #53,618 by scoenye 9/27/02 9:09:49 PM Reply	No problem with the libraries I guess you could call it the Windozification of Linux: hide everything behind layers of cruft that enforce "sensible" defaults. Only "sensible" doesn't necessarily apply the same outside Germany. And in this case, I found it required way too much effort to get a "Pro" version to do what I needed it to do. I started off from a blank HDD using the SuSe DVD, so everything checked out re. shared libraries. I didn't try turning off Yast modules, but then I probably would have turned everything off... I recall the firewall setup to be particularly loathsome because half of it was done in Yast, the other half required hand-editing the rc.config file. And I'm stil tripping over Yast/Suse left-overs to this day.

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