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.

Comments

YaST - great for newbs but...

[hawkeyeMI]

While YaST may be great for people who know nothing about linux (and I'm happy to see that they're releasing it!) it annoys the hell out of me. Maybe I'm just not familiar with SuSE but it seems to me like any changes you make manually to configs will either (a) not take effect or (b) be overwritten by YaST next time you do something with it. Autoyast is very neat, btw. Apparently RedHat has something similar to that.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I use SuSE at home, i have become quite accustomed to using YaST. Although sometimes it does not make changes, I find that that is very rare, and can be changed manualy. I have never seen YaST overwrite a config file in having used it for over a year. Overall I think YaST is amazing, and is supperior to most other linux managment tools that I have used.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[texroot]

I think that the general rule for gui config tools is to either use the tool or config things manually, but don't do both. Or, use the tool, then add your manual tweaks, saving a copy of the config before using the gui tool again.

Aggravating, but I've seen the case made for this typical behaviour elsewhere. The justification is that if joe user invokes the gui tool you want predictable results, not results subtly sabotaged by a previous botched hand edit of config files.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[ickoonite]

Apple does a good job here with their System Preferences.

On my iBooks, I have a firewall configured the old-fashioned way - using pico :P. If I try to tinker with the firewall using the relevant Preference Pane, I am warned that other firewall software is in use on the machine and that I cannot configure the firewall using Apple's pretty GUI unless I sort this out first. This basic level of protection can't be hard to do.

A better thing would of course be to get the GUI to be kind to custom-written configuration files, but this could be quite hard to do.

iqu :)

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[ebuck]

I'd say that YaST is great for the average user, not just the newbie. Diehard system admins usually won't use an all-in-one gui anyway, but when they do, they expect a lot more from it than is expected by the average user.

My only gripe with YaST was once I ran into a nasty corner case. YaST had the options (and yes, there are times when there's no gui for the bit you want to twiddle) but they didn't work as advertised. As a result I had to partially configure my software by hand and partially via YaST. It was horrible, and took more than 10 times the effort of doing the whole thing by hand in the first place.

I strongly advocate (and I'm sure others do too) that should you use a GUI config tool, use it consistently and exclusively. Most GUI tools are mature enough to handle all the common setup and admin needs for the average user. Some people feel that using a GUI is slightly more risky since there may be a day when the GUI doesn't go where you need to, but in my experience that rarely happens these days.

Note that there is always an exception, and in this case it is RedHat/Fedora. Their config architecture of a database oriented back end which parses the config files and monitors for manual updates (via timestamps) and a GUI front end that connects via network interface isn't exactly lightweight, but at least it's a system that is designed to handle both methods of updating. And no, I'm not referring to their older RedHat configure-everything-with-this-one-app tool, may it rest in peace (forever).

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[ebuck]

The windows registry sucks because it's a bad implementation of a good idea.

Not all people like the idea of a database to hold you're configuration information, but data is data, and if you hold it in a database or a flat file the end result is the same.

The "suckiness" of the windows registry comes from how badly they implemented the thing, and the incredible lack of accessible documentation in it's early release. Somehow you're supposed to know that

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE ->Autodesk ->
AutoCAD -> R14.0 -> ACAD-12:409 ->
Applications -> AecBase -> LOADCTRLS
is supposed to be set to 0x0000000d (13)
(as opposed to say 5)

Add to that a bad heirarchial organization where you often find directory trees that are confusing in their similarity, and thousands (or so it seems) of entries which are similar but not identical. For example, both "system" and "System" are in the registry multiple times. Sometimes chaning a "system" to a "System" breaks things, other times it does not.

Finally you have my favorites, directories with nearly no meaning at all (at least none that can be discerned) such as:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT -> .$A
(and it's kin)

You have to look at the contents of these beauties to try to figure out what it is they are describing.

The registry idea isn't bad. Some may not like it, but others do. But certainly, the Windows Registry totally sucks (as in, my will to live).

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[zhenlin]

Put all your eggs in one basket! Yessiree, this basket will hold any kind of egg, and very many eggs too!

The Windows registry is not easy to repair, having a binary on-disk format. What is worse, is that the most important things (system and personal settings) are condensed into one single database file each.

Config files have the benefit of being able to hook into the filesystem permissions, by sheer virtue of being a file.

Additionally, by seperating out each configuration file, there is no single point of failure. (Other than rm -rf /etc ; or equivalent corruption)

Anyway. If you want a key-value registry, look at gconfd of GNOME. (Even that isn't a single monolithic database, it is actually stored as a folder hierarchy on disk, and the file format is based on XML)

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Lennie]

Supposedly FAI is supperior to all of the above.

Because it seems more vendor neutral. It's not something I've checked, though. It's definitly something to look at, if you need such a thing.

I love open source, BUT

[RLiegh]

aren't Novell giving away the store here? Just the same way that frustrated OpenBSD users distribute unauthorised OpenBSD iso's, now frustrated SuSE fans will be legally able to distribute home-rolled SuSE isos...or worse yet: Steal YaST lock stock and barrel and take away Novell's market.

Is this really such a good thing, in the long run?

Novell's doing?

[Coryoth]

So is this a sign of the "We are really taking open source on board" that Novell has been trying to sell us, or is this just an internal SuSE decision? To be honest, I'm quietly hoping this was a Novel call, and that it's a sign that we have a big player really taking open source and GPL seriously. That, and hopefully it would be a sign that Novell might eventually start open sourcing some of their own applications, which would be a tremendous boost for FOSS.

Jedidiah.

YaST vs. Anaconda?

[Xystance]

So, alright...

I purchase SuSE 9.0 Professional, DVD.

I boot off the DVD, and I get a whopping five step process that takes me through everything from network configuration, partitioning, and hardware configuration AS WELL as choosing a password for root and another user.

Incredible. Combined with hotplug even X configuration may not be necessary. This really could put the barriers to installing, configuring, and beginning to use Linux (for the general public of course) to rest.

But, what about the Anaconda installer?
Relatively simple install and relatively problem free. Not quite as "pretty" as SuSE has made YaST, but it does the job just as well. Then why hasn't Anaconda become a defacto standard? (Though, look at installing Gentoo from binary stages and GRP packages through Anaconda... looks damn good)

So, why does Mandrake choose to make their own installer? Why do other "user-friendly" distributions choose to use other installers? What are the deficiencies in Anaconda that have not attracted others to this install process? Are those same deficiencies non-existent in YaST?

Therefore, I pose the question :

Anaconda vs. YaST : All other variables made equal, which is easier to use as a user, and which is easier to implement as a distro developer?

Re:YaST vs. Anaconda?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Anaconda is also getting ported to Debian by Progeny last I remember in addition to the gentoo port.

If I am not mistaken, the reason that Mandrake dosn't use anaconda, is that at the time that they made thier own installer, the anaconda installer just wasn't up to par. It, and all the redhat-config-* tools, have improved dramatically since RH8 and up.

Other Closed Programs in SUSE?

[Landaras]

I am a huge SUSE fan, in fact running 9.0 Professional as I type this.

Before, SUSE kept individuals from reselling their ISO's by leveraging YaST. Specifically, the YaST license states that you can freely make copies of ISO's containing it, and give them away. However, no money could change hands in the process.

Want to host SUSE ISO's containing YaST for all of your friends? The YaST license says 'go for it.' Want to charge them five dollars to download them (just to cover your hosting costs). The YaST license says you can't do that.

You could still extract OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, and other GPL'd (or similar) software from the SUSE distro and distribute those as you wished, but it was YaST that you could only give away, never sell.

Novell appears to be opening YaST up to try to get the market and other parties to standardize on it. I applaud this, as I definitely consider YaST to be a best-of-breed application.

My question is, is there any other software within the SUSE distro that Novell could leverage to keep the SUSE ISO's from being sold?

- Neil Wehneman

Re:Other Closed Programs in SUSE?

[sflory]

My feeling is having talked with some of the Novell people during the early days of the merger. The Suse Linux product will become much more like Red Hat Linux was. I'm fairly sure that you will see the following products suse 9.1 products free download /w isos, basic cdrom with installation support and manuals, and profession with some additional non free stuff. Of course I'm just guessing, but I get the feeling Novell intends to open things up a lot.

Remember that Novell isn't in the Linux distro business. Suse is a way for Novell to sell services, and additional enterprise software around. That and counter blance MS, and RH. Let's face it if Intel, and IBM actually liked Red Hat. Suse would have been out of business long ago. Then again having dealt with RH selling their RHEL product. I'm beginning to understand the feeling.

Different view.

[eddy]

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.

Several years ago, when I came from Slackware to SuSe (just playing around), I found YaST to be extremely irritating, confusing and all together useless. I'd make a small change in a menu and that would trigger the running of lots and lots of mysterious scripts all over the place, doing gawd knows what. Went back to slackware after that.

(This was, as I said, years ago and is not a comment on YaST as of today).

YaST over SSH

[Anonymous Coward]

Best thing about YaST is that you can easily run it over an ssh connection. It works almost exactly the same over a terminal as from a X session.

I got on board

[pair-a-noyd]

with Suse 9.0 and I knew then that it was the right move. I used (and started out on) Mandrake 8.1 and stuck with it through 9.1, but when 9.2 released I switched to Suse.

I also switched everyone I know to Suse and they all agree, Suse is damn good stuff.

This is great news and I know that this will boost Suse sales. I push Suse and now I have another selling point.

Thank you Suse, thank you Novell..

SaX

[Landaras]

The article doesn't mention SaX, which I believe to be a fully separate program. For those who don't run SUSE, SaX handles video cards and monitors.

I ask because SaX saved me a few hours ago. I came home from school for a week, and left my 19" monitor at my apartment. I'm using a spare 17" monitor while at home. Unfortunately the refresh rate configured for the 19" monitor is incompatible with the lesser monitor.

I dreaded having to get a crash course in X configuration in order to manually change the refresh rate, but thankfully had SaX. I just restarted, chose "failsafe" from the GRUB options, hit SaX2 after logging in at the shell, and SaX automatically corrected the resolution and refresh rate to my new monitor.

I still haven't convinced my Windows 2000 box (damn you iTunes!) to adjust to the new monitor.

I'll poke with the Windows box some more in the morning, but I found it interesting that SaX fixed this problem quicker and with less fuss than Windows 2000.

- Neil Wehneman

Thanks SUSE/Novell

[Adrian De Leon]

As one of the "OSS" zealots that has bitched and moaned about Yast's licence in the past, I would like to thank SUSE/Novell for this license change. ;-)

Now I can recomend and use SUSE without any holdups.

Please support SUSE with this decision by voting with your wallet.

It seems that Novell is making the right moves regarding Linux! I hope it pays off for them and the Community

Try it!

[invisik]

I suggest anyone who hasn't seen SUSE 9.0 Pro to go out and try it. YaST is so simple and SUSE has done an excellent job in integrating things on the desktop with lots of standard drivers.

I can't wait for 9.1! I'm really excited to get on an integrated 2.6 and KDE 3.2 distro.

-m

Thanks!

[Nermal6693]

SuSE has been my preferred distro for years, and a good part of that decision has been due to YaST. Configuring Linux with YaST is easier than configuring Windows. Well I suppose once XP came out, Linux looked a LOT easier in comparison :) So thanks SuSE/Novell, for opening up your distribution further. I hope that this move helps others to see the light.

were you really joking?

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Remember that Microsoft won an Open Source Product Excellence award at LinuxWorld NY 2003.

YaST support for console

[0x0d0a]

Does YaST support running in the console as well as X?

I ask because this is important to many people -- and I remember that a good point of Red Hat's old Linuxconf was that it ran in both the console and X.

In Sun Java Desktop too

[mcbridematt]

Also interesting is the fact that YaST is in Sun Java Desktop. You wonder how they did that?

Portability

[kinema]

YaST is a great installer. Does anyone know how portable it is? One of the major things that the up and comming Debian installer has going for it is it's nearly toatal platform agnosticism.

I know that YaST is a lot more refined and user friendly then d-i but the later was designed more as a highly portable framework that can be imporved upon with shiny GUIs as people see fit.

I want to be clear YaST was great last time I used it and I applaud Novell for opening the source. I'm just currious about it's portability. It's been some time since I've installed SuSE on anything.

Open Source Oscar of the year goes to Novell

[LibrePensador]

One of the things keeping me from using Suse was that I simply do not do proprietary distributions. That's why I left the proprietary camp.

I applaud this move. I don't mind paying for tools if I know that the tools will be available if, god forbid, a company goes out of business or is bought out by an unscrupulous company.

Excellent, insightful move that signals that Novell does get the essence of what open source is about.

Now, GPL OpenExchange and let it become the de-facto groupware server in the open source world and watch as the knowledge pool of people who can configure it grow and as it does it quickly eats into Microsoft's exchange sales.

Re:Will it actually be useful...

[ebuck]

I can't speak about YaST, because it's just now available and it takes time to adopt such things, but I can tell you the answer could be a resounding YES.

Compare the situation with RedHat's installer Anaconda. Anaconda has been open for quite some time now, and by being open my company (and a large number of others) have been able to build custom "in-house" distros for the automated installation of systems.

In our case, it's as simple as deciding if it's going to be a desktop, network monitoring server, vanilla RedHat box, proxy/firewall, or Tomcat server, and then booting the system off a floppy to perform the install (or re-install).

This would not be feasible without Anaconda being open; however, the reason it's not adopted more often is because it takes time to wade through the numerous little problems to figure out why it's not working in your case (and honestly, not that many people need this kind of functionality).

Re:YAST vs urpmi

[r_j_prahad]

Not sure but maybe my SuSE Version 9 distro is diffrent from everyone elses.

Nope, mine works the same way as yours. Heck, I even mix adding packages on my SuSE box with "kpackage" and "rpm" as well as with YaST. Somehow, it all just works together. Remember that cartoon showing a huge flowchart on a blackboard where the middle box was labeled "magic happens"?

Re:Good work Novell

[ciaran_o_riordan]

For the last 5 years, while GNU/Linux was eating Microsofts lunch, Novell was fading out of the spotlight, hanging on through existing contracts.

Meanwhile, all the big players have realised that free software is the future. Business models based on control will be obsolete in a decade or two. Unfortuneatly, Microsofts business model - since they do little other than software sales - their model is based completely on control.

MS are trying to pretend that freedom is not inevitable, hoping that if they can postpone it for long enough, it won't happen. (Due to Trusted Computing or similar.)

Meanwhile the others (IBM, SUN, HP, etc. and now Novell) have accepted it, but they want to slow it down so because it will take time to port their business models to the new way of doing software.

SuSE was one of the big GNU/Linux vendors, but they were slowly declining. Their use of proprietary software showed a gap in their appreciation of how the free software economy will work. Novell seem to have a better grasp on the concept. I'm looking forward to what they do with SuSE.

ease-of-use will come in time. user-orientated free-as-in-cost trustable-as-in-viewable are all functions of free-as-in-freedom. I'm looking forward to all the distros now sharing installer&config code.