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YaST to Become Open Source
Space_Soldier writes "According to News.com, YaST is going open source: 'For years, SUSE has considered its YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) software for installing, configuring and managing Linux an advantage over its competitors and forbade them from incorporating it into the products they sold. But with the new plan, to be announced Monday at Novell's Brainshare conference, the company will release YAST under the GPL, sources familiar with the plan said.'" Several years ago, when I first used YaST, I found it to be superior to the rest of the all-in-one administation tools around at the time. It was generally regarded as a great program, save for the licensing. Today, that's no longer a concern.
Autoyast is very neat, btw. Apparently RedHat has something similar to that.
Yep.
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
This comes just a few months after Anaconda, the RedHat installer, started being used for another distro (is it Debian's new installer?). Novell obviously saw this move as a good thing.
Well, I dunno what other OS is using it as it's installer, but it's not debian. Debian's new installer's self rolled, text only, very basic stuff. Anaconda has, however, been ported to install Debian by Progeny. Pretty neat, but I don't see it eever taking precidence to the Debian Installer.
And I do agree with you that it probably won't take away any market share. If anything, it sets up SuSE as running against RedHat, which should be a very interesting battle. And we are the ones to benefit.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I'm running YaST Online Update (YOU) in the background even as I type this, downloading a new Athlon kernel and associated security patches. YaST is not your run-of-the-mill useless sysadmin megascript; it's forty or fifty inter-related packages that address every important aspect of managing a Linux system. Microsoft doesn't have anything close to it. I don't know of any reason why you couldn't use it on any RPM-based distro, but I have to admit I've been using it solely on desktops, and not in a server environment. It's the newb's answer to keeping a healthy up-to-date patched Linux box on the Internet that won't be a detriment to it's neighbors or an embarassment to the Linux community.
No, you must not be very familiar with YAST. Starting it from the command prompt yields a ncurses GUI with the same functions that you would get from the Qt version. So, the parent is quite correct in that it is easy to use over a plain SSH connection.
Yes, the YaST ncurses interface is fully on par with the X-based version. You can even choose not to install the graphical version if you don't want it. The actual heavy lifting is shared, and the front-ends are only interfaces to use it.
I've been using SuSE since about 5.1 and Yast has come one hell of a long way since then. With Yast there are basicaly three levels of adminstrability. The first is the simplest method using the Yast tool, which works the same in console gui and X-Win gui. Next is using the /etc/sysconfig scripts and then calling SuSEconfig as needed. If you look closely Yast actualy edits the files in the /etc/sysconfig directory and then calls SuSEconfig. Finaly you can turn off SuSEconfig for various programs by changing that programs sysconfig file in the /etc/sysconfig directory. Thus if you want to use your own config file for say bind you can do so without SuSEconfig writing over them.
Overall I think SuSE has struck a very good balance between gui tools, and config files.
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
$ rpm -qa | grep curse
ncurses-5.3-110
yast2-ncurses-2.8.20-3
There is a ncurses version and best of all you can find all the options and menus in the same places as you would with the X version - very consistent. It's funny I replied to another poster earlier today who was complaining about YaST being "closed source". This is great news because hopefully now we can put this "non-gpl" argument behind us and support Novell & SUSE with our wallets on May 6th when SUSE 9.1 becomes available. Or pre-order it now - I don't know from where though. I do remember seeing a link somewhere during a Google search.
I don't think it's that easy: http://opengroupware.org/en/users/faq/index.html
How does OGo compare to SuSE OpenExchange?
A: SuSE OpenExchange is actually two things: an OpenSource messaging server based on Cyrus and OpenLDAP and a closed source, proprietary web groupware server (ComFire).
OGo is very similiar to the groupware server part and indeed you can install OGo as the groupware component on an OpenExchange server to save the ComFire license costs and use a solution wholly composed of OpenSource software.
SaX2 is LGPL, according to /usr/share/doc/packages/sax2/LICENCE
Actually, SuSE/YaST has a pretty good way of dealing with this. Many of the auto-generated files, e.g. modprobe.conf, have comments explicitly telling you to edit [filename], but to make your own [filename].local, which is incorporated with an include statement at the end of the file, and tweak that to your heart's content. This way all your custom changes are preserved.
Yes, you can do that in other distros as well, but YaST sets it up for you by default.
SUSE even required user accounts be managed through YAST, what kind of nonense is that? Hmmm adding users in both YaST and from the command line using useradd works for me... Heck YaST even shows them and don't overwrite or change them not matter which way I add users... Not sure but maybe my SuSE Version 9 distro is diffrent from everyone elses.
Huh? Downhill in what way. I have used YAST since, shoot, a long time anyway, and I've seen nothing but improvments all along. Can you give some examples as to what has degraded, regressed, etc. over time? And for what it's worth I would imagine that Novell is GPL'ing it as YAST's lack of GPL has been one of the biggest gripes of SUSE users over the years.
I believe that YAST was the "big reason" that SUSE (my personal favorite Linux distro) didn't have ISO's for download. I never had any trouble installing from FTP, and I will continue to buy the retail packages for the great manuals, but ISO's would SURE be nice.
Quite a few people seem to hate SuSEconfig changing what they had manually changed, check here: /etc/sysconfig/suseconfig
You'll notice this:
"## Path: System/SuSEconfig
## Description:
## Type: yesno
## Default: yes
#
# Some people don't want SuSEconfig to modify the system. With this
# entry you can disable SuSEconfig completely.
# Please don't contact our support if you have trouble configuring your
# system after having disabled SuSEconfig. (yes/no)
#
ENABLE_SUSECONFIG="yes""
Set that to no then, saves the trouble in switching over to a completely different distro. Whilst you're at it, check the other files in that directory.
YaST has already been open source. It was just not GPL'd.
As do Solaris and HP-UX.
YaST is nice and makes a great foundation for configuration. Are we talking YaST and/or YaST2? But SaX2, the X11 configuration tool, has been exceptional in my experience.
Anyone can configure a Linux machine these days, but few can get the X11 configuration working correctly.
If linux is truely aiming for the Desktop, wouldn't it make sense to have X11 configuration realiable and easy?
The real test now is coming into the configuration of peripheral devices more than the core OS and applications. Email and Web is not hard to do if you pay some attention to what you are doing.
But getting USB, FireWire, printers, sound, video all working cleanly and consistently will be the real test. Many distributions do this well to different degrees of success, but as always you have to check your hardware carefully before you buy it. This peripheral support is still a factor holding back the adoption of Linux
But consistent with the problem of obtaining a Desktop Linux is the problem with Multimedia. Multimedia support under free sucks really bad. SuSE ships with the lamest install of xine/mplayer I've ever experienced. And it's not just SuSE or Debian. It's the multimedia libraries and all the Intellectual Property bullshit. There's no innovation here folks, just territorial land grabbing.
Maybe with the EU having the balls to make a judgement against Microsoft and the chance of them sticking with it in the vote today, there's a chance that some day we'll be able to watch DVD's on our Linux computers without the need to hide in closets.
I think the release of YaST means this:
YaST2 and the entire Linux community has developed to such a point that YaST no longer holds a leading edge against the competition to the extent that it used to. As such it would be a better investment if YaST was more freely available to evolve according to the OS environment as we (SuSE/Novell) concentrated our efforts on other tools that still provide a leading edge over the competition (YaST3?, SaX2..)
This isn't to say in any way that YaST isn't still a valuable tool. But it might be a matter of, "We have a pretty good tool, lets give it back to the community.... Now that's done we can gather around another project more intensively."
Like Anaconda.
I wonder what Debian or Gentoo has to say... They need some help with this stuff, especially Gentoo.