(Null) Second Impressions

Post #53,020 by pwhysall 9/24/02 12:46:43 PM Reply	(Null) Second Impressions OK. So, we've got Null installed. It looks good. I mean, super-super-super-GOOD. And then, the Red Hat suckiness commences. I want to interoperate with my Windows network. I can choose "Windows File Server" as a task in the package manager, so I do. I install it. And... ...nothing. There are no tools whatsoever to configure this. I fancy a bit of printing. After some poking around through the various packages (is this an "office" thing? Aha, here's a "print server" task) I install CUPS, which is so much better than lpd or lprNG that it's not funny. Deps are resolved, supashiny progress meters do their progression thing. Life looks good. Again, silence. No post-install config, nothing. Er, I'd like to add a printer, please. And start the CUPS stuff. Where's the service gone? This sucks. I go to add a printer, knowing that I have a Debian box happily running CUPS elsewhere and I fancy just using that, as it's already got our big Oc\ufffd printers configured and set up. Connecting to another CUPS server is not an option. I go to my corporate intranet. The java applet doesn't work as I have no java. I can't find java at all in the package manager. I'm in major SUCKS mode now, as I can't use the intranet without java. This kind of crap is why I abandoned Red Hat and its ilk. Cute little haikus during the installer do NOT make up for the fact that this pile of shite doesn't work right. Yeah, yeah, it's a beta. Who wants to take bets on this kind of fundamental stuff being fixed by the time RH 8.0 goes gold? To be absolutely fair, I very much doubt that SuSE or Mandrake are much different. I'll be experimenting with those at some point in the future. 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 #53,022 by deSitter 9/24/02 12:51:56 PM Reply	Re: (Null) Second Impressions SuSE had a huge jump up in version 7, peaking at 7.2, while version 8 seems distinctly a backward step. -drl
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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