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

Good work Novell

[Teh_monkeyCode]

Hopefully we can get other large companies putting as much support into open source as Novell is.

Re:Good work Novell

[hawkeyeMI]

I would say Novell's very livelihood depends on their switch to Linux. AFAIK they were no longer going anyhere, though they were once the leaders.

Let's hope they can bring the famed Novell ease-of-use to Linux.

Re:Good work Novell

[Canberra Bob]

Yes, it would be good if large companies like:
IBM, Hewlett Packard, Sun, etc would become interested in open source wouldnt it?

Re:Good work Novell

[Myuu]

forgot Apple!

Re:Good work Novell

[SphericalCrusher]

That'd be real good, but I doubt we'll ever see it. The whole world is about money and ignorance. Showing off their source code to the world is like taking a punch in the face in front of your girlfriend to some.

I guess a lot of companies just like to sit around and brag about how good their software helps Earth; they don't really want anyone to know how it actually is because someone else's might be better. It's a huge pride issue.

Arrogancy owns the world.

Re:Good work Novell

[pizza_milkshake]

...brag about how good their software helps Earth; they don't really want anyone to know how it actually is because someone else's might be better. It's a huge pride issue.

this is absolutely true. when i show someone my source code and they find a problem with it or criticize some part of it, it's kind of embarassing. but you just have to realize that you don't know everything and that it's not about you being perfect, it's about better code.

Re:Good work Novell

[ErikTheRed]

It's not quite all open source, but props to Novell for finally releasing a downloadable evaluation version of SuSe Enterprise Server...

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.

Re:Good work Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

Business models based on control will be obsolete in a decade or two.

Yeah right.

MS are trying to pretend that freedom is not inevitable

It isn't. Never has been never will be.

the others (IBM, SUN, HP, etc. and now Novell) have accepted it

They haven't accepted anything. They're just milking it for whatever they can, while they can.

they want to slow it down so because it will take time to port their business models to the new way of doing software.

Stop this shit. You mean it will take time for them to come up with (some half-assed) business models, not 'port' their existing ones.

ease-of-use will come in time

And in the mean time? You're going to be repeating that for a long time to come.

I'm looking forward to all the distros now sharing installer&config code.

This makes no sense. Since installer and config code is the only thing that sets distributions apart, looking forward to 'all the distros' sharing such code would suggest that you only want one single distro; a single way of doing things. How very contradictory to the rest of the bile you just spewed forth.

Re:Good work Novell

[Boltronics]

That has got to be one of the most negative ways of looking at things I have ever seen! :)

Re:Good work Novell

[murdocj]

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.

Also, humans will establish a viable colony on Mars and the war on terrorism will be over.

Open source is a great idea. It works in some cases. I see zero evidence that it's going to take over the entire universe of software. In a few cases like Linux where you are able to apply the efforts of lots of bright folks to the project, it may well win. In lots of other areas that aren't of general interest, seems pretty unlikely.

Re:Good work Novell

[shyster]

Meanwhile, all the big players have realised that free software is the future.

Not very many companies are making a killing on OSS right now. Some, like IBM, are subsidizing it from their HW sales. Others, like Novell, Red Hat, and Ximian, are still trying to figure it out. I'd say it's a bit early to call it won.

Business models based on control will be obsolete in a decade or two.

Just about every business model, not just software, depends on control. That's why businesses spend so much money getting IP protection laws passed. Every business wants locked-in customers, it's a good revenue stream. When OSS companies start playing with the big boys (public investors), they're going to have to find a way to keep them happy.

Unfortuneatly, Microsofts business model - since they do little other than software sales - their model is based completely on control.

Let's see. According to the latest FY2004 1st quarter results (ending on Sept 30, 2003), MSFT gets about 15% of their revenue from segments besides OS and Office sales.

However, if you take the time to read thru their segmentations, you'll notice that Server and Tools also includes MSDN training and tools, certifications, MS Press, consulting services, and Premier PSS - all non software revenue. According to their financial highlights, we can calculate that Consulting and PSS revenue was $231 million, and MSDN and MS Press was $190 million. Their Office segment also includes revenu from LiveMeeting and Professional PSS, but they don't give figures to calculate that portion of it.

Adding those numbers together, we can see that non-software revenue is about 20% of their total revenue. That is also significantly higher than the previous year, while their OS and Office segments have been relatively flat (do you think someone at MSFT might have noticed that?).

Okay, so we can realistically claim that 80% of Microsoft's revenue is from software sales. But, that 20% of non-software revenue (which, again, is growing) is a pretty impressive $1.7 billion (that's with a B) per quarter - that's about $7 billion a year.

To put that into perspective, VA Linux's revenue is $24 million (that's with a M) a year. Red Hat's revenue is $90 million (that's with a M) a year. Novell's revenue is $1.1 billion a year. Sun's revenue is $11 billion per year (but note that they lost money, even discounting non-recurring expenses).

IBM's revenue is a much higher $80 billion a year...but let's take a look at their cost of revenue and expenses. While MSFT earns almost an ungodly 30% profit on its revenue, IBM's profit is a paltry 8% (I didn't include non-recurring expenses)! MSFT nets more profits on it's $30 billion of revenue than IBM does on it's $80 billion! The story is much the same with HP, though their profit is a even smaller 5%.

I think it's safe to say that MSFT's non-software revenue is quite healthy, and ever growing.

While I like FOSS, I've yet to see how it can sustain a viable corporate business. And, until that time comes, investor money will continue to flock to MSFT so that they can make even more $$. And, even if FOSS wins the war, expect MSFT to remain around for quite a long time. Despite what Linux zealots may think, MSFT is not stupid, and they know how to make money. In the game of business, that's what it's all about...not the ideals of FOSS.

Re:Good work Novell

[tiger99]

Yes, and I think that it means that certain long overdue bug fixes in Yast may happen. On the whole, it is fairly good, but not perfect. Effort into improving areas like this will be make a very important contribution towards the acceptance of Linux on the desktop.

Re:Good work Novell

[imr]

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.)
The similar is that the free (for freedom) movement has not penetrated the hardware business. So microsoft is slowly becoming a hardware provider, the xbox being the testbed.
Trusted computing, drm, whatever is going to be their excuse, hardware is going to be the way they try to keep their proprietary grip on personal computers.
How long before they try to buy one of the main graphic players?

Re:Good work Novell

[NighthawkFoo]

IBM owns multiple factories, chip foundries, and other large, expensive properties. It just costs more to produce physical goods than software. The days of getting 30% margin on a mainframe are over.

How long until MS is forced to reduce their margins to a similar level?

Re:Good work Novell

[DrWhizBang]

You have just gone to a lot of trouble to confirm what the previous poster said: Microsoft makes an obscene amount of money from selling software alone, profit margins like no other company on earth. And even their non-software reveunue is growing - eventually, Microsoft will need to be able to survive on it alone, because people will prefer free software. The trend is obvious.

All things considered, software is data, and data is hard to control, so to make profits through control you need to sell something else, like hardware or services.

Re:Good work Novell

[wasabii]

"While I like FOSS, I've yet to see how it can sustain a viable corporate business."

100% right. But FOSS can and does sustain non-software companies. It's only a matter of time before non-software companies can simply see no point in using anything other than FOSS, leaving software companies out in the cold.

You're right, it can't sustain a software company like closed source can. And that is not going to change. Software companies need to accept meger profit margins, or go out of business.

That's what a commodity is.

Re:Good work Novell

[Patoski]

Not very many companies are making a killing on OSS right now. Some, like IBM, are subsidizing it from their HW sales. Others, like Novell, Red Hat, and Ximian, are still trying to figure it out. I'd say it's a bit early to call it won.

Red Hat has been able to rack up profitable quarterly results in a very spending averse environment. I'd say they're a bit past figuring out how to make money. Maybe a year or so ago I would've agreed with you but I can't say the same now. Also, circumstantial evidence points to the fact that SuSe was cash flow positive when they were purchased by Novell which further bolsters the case for making money in open source.

Just about every business model, not just software, depends on control. That's why businesses spend so much money getting IP protection laws passed.

Business models aren't (or shouldn't be) based around control they're based around providing value to customers. Sometimes control is a means by which companies use to try to keep other companies from providing value in the same way. But to base your business on control is a great way to the poor house (just look at IBM and the in the 80-90's).

Every business wants locked-in customers, it's a good revenue stream.

How about providing a better product than your competitor? This is what capitalism is based on after all. Providing a better product/service than your competition so consumers will give you money. Inevitably companies based on control lose that control and crumble into ash as their product isn't competitive without the old controls. I'm not saying that a collapse of that magnitude is getting ready to happen to MS but they do need to be careful.

When OSS companies start playing with the big boys (public investors), they're going to have to find a way to keep them happy.

I don't quite understand what you mean here by "playing with the big boys" since so many Linux companies are publicly traded.

Let's see. According to the latest FY2004 1st quarter results (ending on Sept 30, 2003), MSFT gets about 15% of their revenue from segments besides OS and Office sales.

Revenue is largely meaningless (as you point out with respect to Sun). It is better to talk about profit but anyway...

MSFT nets more profits on it's $30 billion of revenue than IBM does on it's $80 billion! The story is much the same with HP, though their profit is a even smaller 5%.

This is precisely why MS is ripe for the pickings. With these profit margins MS hasn't exactly made a lot of friends with it's customers. Linux will to a degree commoditize OSes which is really the natural progression in free markets. Product / service offerings become mature, areas of opportunity for differentiation are exhausted by the market and they become increasingly commoditized. This type of environment is antithetical to the insane profit margins that MS is used to. Just look at all the deals and discounts that MS is offering to keep people from switching. That should tell you what's coming down the road. MS wouldn't offer these deep discounts unless they felt they had to because of competition.

I think it's safe to say that MSFT's non-software revenue is quite healthy, and ever growing.

Certainly MS' revenue is very large but ever growing? This is certainly not true and easily disproved. If you look at MS's 10-Q for 4Q 04 you'll see that last quarter their software revenues were flat. The only thing that gave them a positive earnings growth this quarter was their investments department. Why do you think MS has started offering a (small) dividend? Their investors demanded it for two reasons: because of the great amount of cash MS has on hand and the realization by investors that MS is no longer the high growth company it once was. How do you maintain high revenue growth rates when your OS and office suite comes shipped with just about every computer sold? The answer is you cannot unless y

Re:Good work Novell

[MyHair]

While I like FOSS, I've yet to see how it can sustain a viable corporate business.

You, like many others, assume that FOSS has to be sold to be successful in business.

In fact, it is this business model that is being attacked. Don't look at it from the IT vendor point of view, look at it from the IT consumer point of view.

With FOSS, a company that makes widgets (that analogy isn't overused, is it?) can decrease IT costs and either boost their profit margins or lower their prices to gain a competitive advantage.

The basic needs either are or can become commodities: accounting software, communication software, office suites, etc..

The evolutionary trick is going to be that these companies need to cooperate in some way to fund the development and maintenance of the buisness core software. (Currently much open source software is designed for the amusement of the developer.) Or perhaps an IT vendor will fill that role in a low profit-margin situation.

I don't expect proprietary software to disappear completely (does your company make you drink tapwater or pay to give you bottled water?), but the profit margins will fall.

Re:Good work Novell

[Da'Rante]

Just about every business model, not just software, depends on control. That's why businesses spend so much money getting IP protection laws passed. Every business wants locked-in customers, it's a good revenue stream. When OSS companies start playing with the big boys (public investors), they're going to have to find a way to keep them happy.

Check out the car industry for a model of business that is based on both. Most car buyers purchase cars based upon the cars individual merits. On the other hand they attempt to lock you in with leases. It is much easier to just "upgrade" your lease at the end of a lease term, than it is to terminate the lease. The great part is YOU have a choice.

Re:Good work Novell

[Manitcor]

Great post, I've known about the progression of a commodity for sometime but never thought about it in a software sence. I've thought for a long time that MS is heading down the IBM road.

Hopefully they will learn thier lesson that IBM did, money is in innovation not stagnation. A previous poster mentioned that IBM takes less profit on the 80billion of revenue but thats simply becasue they put so much more of it back into the future of the compnay as opposed to sitting in a bank account.

And I have to say Im quite glad Microsoft has proven that its not that good at expanding into new markets. Though I expected as much, partners, vendors and customers are going to be less like to help a company expand when they know how preadatory the company entering the market is.

Re:Good work Novell

[shyster]

Red Hat has been able to rack up profitable quarterly results in a very spending averse environment. I'd say they're a bit past figuring out how to make money. Maybe a year or so ago I would've agreed with you but I can't say the same now. Also, circumstantial evidence points to the fact that SuSe was cash flow positive when they were purchased by Novell which further bolsters the case for making money in open source.

It looks to me that Red Hat lost around $6.5 million last year. Add to that the $140 million the year before, and the $86 million before that and I think they're a large black hole...even with the current $8 million profit they're showing. Of course, I didn't say they couldn't make money...I said they're not making a killing...which MSFT is. Add the fact that Red Hat recently dropped their consumer offerings and focused on the enterprise (which is about when they started to make money), and I'd say they're still trying to figure things out. Novell's acquisition of Suse and Ximian show that they're reengineering their strategy as well. Neither has shown that they can compete with MSFT in the desktop or application market.

Re:Good work Novell

[T-Ranger]

Fairly recently IBM built a new fab plant in NY state. Single largest investement IBM has ever made. Single largest investement in NY state, ever.

Cost: $2.9 billion
Life expectency: 5 years

And the robot control software runs on Linux.

Re:Good work Novell

[maxpublic]

SuSE was one of the big GNU/Linux vendors, but they were slowly declining.

I don't know where you got this from. SuSe's market share and profit margin have been increasingly steadily. They've never been in decline, and their sales numbers show that sometime in the next few years they have the potential to surpass Redhat.

Probably due to the fact that YAST makes it easy even for the clueless to install Linux.

Max

Re:Good work Novell

[Grishnakh]

And there's little reason FOR it to be OSS/free either.

This reminds me of an article I read just yesterday about some business guy complaining that OSS hackers weren't working on "uncool" projects like the software you just mentioned. It amounted to him just wanting stuff without having to pay for it.

OSS isn't a way for people to get any software they want for free, it's a way for a community of people to work together and build software that they ALL need. Everyone needs an Operating System, so it's better if it (or several) are available open-source and Free, so we can all benefit, rather than one or more vendors keeping it locked up, and everyone having to pay them a toll to use it. Lots of people also want to have CD burning programs, media players, drawing programs, and basic office programs (word processor, spreadsheet), so it works well for people to work together on this. Instead of everyone having to continually pay money for every new release of a word processor or CD burning program, a group of people has spent some time writing one for Free, and now everyone can stop reinventing the wheel, and spend their time and money on something new.

Pension administration systems are not part of this. No home computer user needs or wants such a thing, and no OSS hacker has any reason to waste their time working on one for no pay; if they contribute work to a media player, they benefit by getting to watch movie trailers or something, which they couldn't do before. If they work on a pension system, they get nothing.

So, for a niche product like this, the business that needs it needs to pony up the money and just buy it. If they're smart, they'll run all their systems on Free software, so instead of having to pay for OS license, CAL licenses, antivirus licenses, AND the license for the pension program, they'll only have to pay a license for the pension program and everything else will be free.

Of course, there's also the school of thought that purchased software should also be open-source--it should come with the source code in case the vendor goes belly up, so the customers can still use and develop the software on their own if necessary. This is good, but is something the customer needs to work out with the vendor that they're paying for this, and has nothing to do with freely-available OSS/Free software.

Re:Good work Novell

[jack_csk]

For me, open source means freedom.
I would like my Palm Pilot to display Chinese + Japanese, but the current software (CJKOS & CHOS) are not opensource. There are still bugs in those software that keep crashing my PalmOS (even they support my Palm Pilot model).
I would have to provide them more information regarding the problem (or even debug the software) if they set them free.

Re:Good work Novell

[Grishnakh]

As a customer, you need to complain to these vendors and demand that they give you access to the source code of the software you've licensed so that these problems can be resolved.

Of course, they'll probably laugh at you, and this I think is why many people have gotten into F/OSS movement and made software that's both Free and free; they got tired of being pushed around and treated like crap by vendors, so they decided to make their own alternatives.

Re:Good work Novell

[shyster]

Check out the car industry for a model of business that is based on both. Most car buyers purchase cars based upon the cars individual merits. On the other hand they attempt to lock you in with leases. It is much easier to just "upgrade" your lease at the end of a lease term, than it is to terminate the lease. The great part is YOU have a choice.

And those cars' technology is protected with patents out the wazoo. And no one is giving away FOSS cars, or even producing them for that matter.

I also fail to see where you don't have a choice between MSFT and FOSS as it stands now. Just because it may be easier to stay with MSFT doesn't make it a forced issue.

MSFT is concerned, and rightfully so, about protecting their IP. As of now, it's the only proven way to make money in the software market.

Re:Good work Novell

[Grishnakh]

I have another point to add here:

If there's enough of a need for things like pension administration systems, and customers of the vendors of this software are fed up with them, these customers can get together and create their own pension administration software package, or fund the development of one, and then place it under a F/OSS license for others to use.

Here's the benefit: by working together with other companies that need this software, you all get to benefit from your common labor, but no one entity has to shoulder the entire burden. Even more, by opening up the process and source to the public, you might attract even more companies who would like such a package and are willing to contribute. Then, once you "get over the hump" and have a working system, you get to use it and also continually upgrade to the latest version, without having to ever pay license fees, keep track of licenses, worry about your vendor leaving you high and dry, etc. As for concerns about profitting off Free software, obviously there are none because your company is in some other business, and just needs this tool for its business operations. Of course, the proprietary vendor that you used to buy from will go out of business, but too bad. They should have been a better vendor so you didn't have to take this course.

What this boils down to is that F/OSS is a new development method where the users of software have taken responsibility for its development, rather than vendors seeking profit. Whether it's worth it, however, can be different for each situation, and is determined by comparing the cost of licensing from a proprietary vendor (plus all the hassles and nonfreedom this entails) with the cost of being part of a collarborative F/OSS effort. In some cases, it's probably much cheaper and easier to just use a proprietary product, because the work is already done, the vendor might be non-evil, the price might be good, etc. In other cases, starting a F/OSS effort might just be worth it in the long run. And as you should be able to see from all this, the larger the userbase for a particular piece of software, the more attractive a F/OSS solution is.

Re:Good work Novell

[iminplaya]

I see zero evidence that it's going to take over the entire universe of software.

It's still a relatively new concept. Give it time. It's like saying solar power could never meet our electrical demands. Well, it can if we actually want it to.
(redundant)
Some say Kucinich is not electable.
His reply, "I am if you vote for me."
(/redundant)

Finally...

[Seoulstriker]

Maybe I can finally install packages myself without having someone else remotely login and set them up for me.

Give me a break. I'm new to this whole "Linux" thing.

Re:Finally...

[superhoe]

Yeah, I hope so too. I also recently found out that I need to install some extra packages to my Debian.

So much extra work: I had to configure and compile a new kernel, install and configure sshd and secure the whole box (I was too afraid of opening any ports to the Internet) before I could let the administrator in to install the packages I needed. So complicated.

Re:Finally...

[petecarlson]

Maybe I can finally install packages myself without having someone else remotely login and set them up for me.

That's one of the things I like about YaST, I can SSH in and run it to install packages or configure without having to think.

Re:Finally...

[Master of Transhuman]

Guess what. Unless you're a member of the "Power Users" group on Windows 2000/XP, you need to do the same thing on those systems, too.

In fact, more so, since if you open either of them to the Net without a firewall and AV, you're hosed within an HOUR.

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...

[horati0]

Autoyast is very neat, btw. Apparently RedHat has something similar to that.

Yep.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[grolschie]

Same here. An awesome setup tool, however, myself being too Debianized, I try to edit the system files, and YaST overwrites them. arghhh!!!

However, it's an awesome tool. I love their installer and partitioner with the option of automatic NTFS partition resizing and the creation of a dual boot system if it finds Windows on the drive. Superb!

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...

[Penguin Follower]

I, too, got tired of all the "newb-tools" getting in the way on distros like Red Hat, Mandrake... (Never used SUSE though).

I was a big Slackware user after getting started with the easier distros like above. Now, however, I have seen the light -- and the savior's name is Gentoo Linux. I now have two seperate machines running Gentoo compiled from stage one installs :)

Long Live Gentoo!

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[ev1lcanuck]

I've used YaST and Mandrake's version (SetupDrake or InstallDrake or something like that) and I have to say that YaST bugs the hell out of me too. Mandrake's offering is far superior. Although it does sometimes think for itself it doesn't do it as badly as YaST does. YaST is one of those programs that "takes liberties." Blech.

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...

[Nailer]

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.

I think a better rule would be not to make excuses for badly written tools.

GUI config tools should follow three simple rules:

• Use the same config as the app does
  
• never modify configuration without asking
  
• display, preserve, and make editable comments about a configuration item that are placed above that item (with blank lines as delimiters).
  

Otherwise they are useless.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[tigershark97]

You can install suse without yast if you prefer to edit all config files by hand.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Red Storm]

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.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Monx]

Strange. On my system, YaST warns that it won't change hand-altered files and instead creates a file with a similar name containing its suggestions. This is a rather old installation, so that may no longer be a feature. On the other hand it could be an option that I set long ago and forgot about.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Conanymous Award]

If you ever want Linux to become a real destop choice to Joe User, it must get more 'newbieized'. Or, to be more specific, 'windows-ized' (*shudder*). I'm not trolling, but speaking out of experience. Lots of it. I've tried to switch to Linux from Windows many times, but noticed that all too often, if I want to make the OS work the way I want, I have to dive into the dangerous world of config files. YaST is a step into the right direction, and with Novell's decision to set it free I'm sure it's going to get even better.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the old-fashioned way - using pico :P.

well no matter what side of the vi/emacs feud you are on, you can always put your differences aside and agree that pico sucks...

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[bobsledbob]

Which is why we should move to something like XML based configuration files. Lets gui tool configurators and manual tweakers coexist happily.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Hooded One]

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.

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...

[Wiz]

The registry?

1. It is way too complex. There is no way you can understand it all or hand edit it if required.

2. If it is corrupted, your whole OS won't even boot.

3. Its huge! 45MB of my fairly clean XP box.(although it is in a domain and has policies applied to it, etc, etc, but not much software)

4. You can't move the registry between machines, let alone between different versions of Windows. I can move my .config file between the 2.4 & 2.6 kernel if necessary, it just ignores what it doesn't know.

Several smaller independent registiries might work better. e.g. one for linux conf, one for X, one for KDE, etc. So each one has a small well definied file for all configs.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Stachel]

After manual changes you should run SuSEconfig.

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...

[hetta]

YaST checks for changes in manual configs and don't change those config files after that - so if you've worked with one file you can't use yast on that later. Or, you can, but then you have to manually incorporate the whatever.conf.yast file into your whatever.conf file.

Lovely setup really.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, have you ever heard of gconf? It's like the Windows Registry, only for Gnome. It's a centralized XML database for common configuration (at least it doesn't contain binary crap). Just like with "regedit", you use "gconf-editor" to edit it (although since it's simply XML, it should be actually doable to edit by hand).

Personally, I think centralized configuration has a lot of drawbacks. For instance, if there's a problem with gconf (which has happened to me before), then problems crop up throughout Gnome apps, whether the config is applicable or not. It's also a lot simpler to write a shell script that works with a .conf file, than have to deal with XML. Of course, there's obvious benefits as well, due to one app being able to get needed config data from another app in a common location.

I think in the end, the masses will decide, and my bet is on better documentation and standards, rather than a centralized database. After all, how many average "Joe Sixpack" type users use or care about the Registry? It's the developers who will decide in the end, while the clueless users will continue to use graphical config progs ignorant about how they actually work.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[noselasd]

The thing for GUI tools is to read and write the very
same configfile one would edit by hand, and to understand/parse
the whole syntax of that configfile.
User hand edits a config file, GUI tool read/parse it, and presents
the configuration already in it.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[petecarlson]

YsST will overwrite config files and it is a pain but you can turn parts of it off. YaST drove me nuts when it kept trying to call my computer cpete.com.com after I switched from Mandrake to SuSE.

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...

[Welsh Dwarf]

And we can all have it our way, since the biggest plus about Linux is, you've guessed it: choice.

I've set complete newbs up with Mandrake 9.2 (by newbs I mean not used to a computer at all), their perfectly happy. I've set up non profit orgs with a similar setup (Mdk 9.2 + X terminals), they couldn't be happier, everythings just clicky friendly, and that's how they want it.

OTOH, at home I don't want my distro to get in my way, which is why I use Slack (and will probably go the gentoo root when I get broadband), because it suits me.

As long as the kernel and base systems are open, their's no problem with people makeing a Linux distro a Mac/Windows user could use (not to say I've got anything ageinst Mac/Windows that is), since we all get the choice to run what we want.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[holizz]

I use YaST but I've been getting annoyed at it recently. For a start it keeps trying to trick me into installing Java (which I'd rather not do) by telling me to insert the CD whenever I touch the install/remove part. Also, YOU won't let me NOT download certain updates which would take more than two hours to get - I get cut off every 2 hours and I'm only on 56k. That means I can't download ANY updates via YOU anymore.
So I'm not very happy with YaST really.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[openmtl]

Once you play with regdt32 and regedit then its like a flat file :). One big flat file. Without comments or documentation.

When it fails it sucks. I've had Windows not start because of some disk problem making the registry unreadable.

But the same idea is in use within Linux - look at the /proc or /sysfs or look at gconfd or the rpm database.

So the issue isn't so much the registry but how its implemented. With flat files the buety is the ability to add inline documentation. Microosft doesn't have this ability to tag keys with a comment or to have "ghost keys" which are commented out.

So the issue is that its got too many secrets.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Doctor Crumb]

This is what package managers are for. Any program that overwrites the config file from another program is broken and should be fixed.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Moraelin]

Oh no! A 45 MB file, in an age of 300 GB hard drives! The horror! ;)

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[drago]

Same goes true for me... my first thought about it was: hey, now that virtually _every_ setup tool out there is better than yast, they finally opensource that crap.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Conanymous Award]

Welsh Dwarf: that's good to hear. My problem might be that I'm not a complete newbie nor a guru, but instead some kind of a more advanced user, who, however, is used to tweak his OS in the Windows Way. That means I can start solving a problem in Windows environment (checking the drivers, the registry and such), a non-cooperative printer for example, but in Linux I just throw my hands in the air with the same problem.

Somehow it feels that to have Linux fully under your control you've got to have a much deeper understanding of how it works than in Windows. Which in the end, if you have the courage and persistence to find out about all that, isn't a bad thing, but can scare away a less experienced user.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Tim C]

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)

I suggest you take that complaint up with Autodesk; MS can hardly be held responsible for how other companies store their apps' configuration settings, and the documentation they may or may not provide.

True, MS are just as bad in this respect, but surely you could have picked a better example? That's like saying that text config fles are bad, because of sendmail's one.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[chegosaurus]

As do Solaris and HP-UX.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[steve_l]

Another one is that there is no isolation between app components. You cannot have two versions of the same app in different file systems, with different registry keys.

the whole thing is built on the premise that that there is one version of MS office; each user has the right to change some options on that version, but not all.

Also, because write access to bits of the registry are restricted to admins, you cannot install anything complex (like a game) without admin access. Which is just silly.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[oohp]

Frankly XML is rather a pain to edit by hand. You end up writing more stuff, tags and such. I tried out SoL which has XML init scripts and I didn't like it. I like simple configuration files like the ones used for postfix (key = value, and $key).

But yes, XML is quite good when it comes to GUI apps. Gconf is a somewhat ok impementation of the registry concept. If something goes wrong, only the file that is being edited *may* get corrupted, not the entire registry. Xfce also use XML to store its configuration. And the Gaim folks made a wise decision when they moved to XML buddy lists and config.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[ebuck]

Sendmail's config file has documentation. It may be long and unfriendly, but it is possible to understand it.

Most of these "issues" wouldn't even exist if the documentation was clear, concise, and available. Then we would be saying:

Of course it should be 13, 13 means "load last file upon launching".

Whether it's Autodesk's fault for not including some sort of documentation, or MS's fault for not requiring descriptive strings for elements in the registry is up for debate. The prevailing opinion that the MS registry sucks (as it exists today) is hardly every questioned.

For so many companies (including Microsoft) to be using the MS registry so badly, I'd shudder to think that best pratices concerning the registry are being followed (or even published).

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.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[jcam2]

> GUI config tools should follow three simple rules:

Interestingly, those are the same rules that I followed when developing Webmin, yet another administration GUI. Other programs that keep their own databases of settings from which the actual config files are built annoy me, as they make it hard to interoperate with other tools. Some of Redhat's control panels and Linuxconf are guilty of this ..

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Trongy]

Oh no! A 45 MB file, in an age of 300 GB hard drives! The horror! ;)

You are missing the point. Storage space is not the only problems associated with the size. How long does it take to read the file?

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[ssbljk]

YaST change files if it is said to it to change them, but it won't change manually configured files because it keeps track through MD5 sums of files, and instead of that it will save config to backup file so you can use it on your own.
When you need manual config, most of config files that YaST use have ability to include other files, so you deal with your own modifications in another file and no need to change ones that YaST created.

Nowdays YaST is very usefull so I'm switching most configs to use them from YaST because it saves me lot of time when dealing with lot of machines.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Welsh Dwarf]

The problem isn't that everythings hidden, it's that it isn't in the same place. For using a mandrake machine as a stand alone desktop, the command line is (almost) never needed.

I say almost, because I'm sure someone will find something they haven't thought of yet.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[ebassi]

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)

Although it has some shortcomings (it does not support complex data structures), GConf is the Windows registry done right. Not only it has a filesystem backend, its keys are self-descriptive (no HKEY_WHATEVER/SomeApp/Some Key) and every key/value pair should (if programmers aren't lazy) have a XML schema associated to it, with a description (localized to the user's locale), a default value and the application that owns that value.

It also permits to lock-out settings in a network.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Bagsy]

Kickstart is cool, but not quite as powerfull as AIX/NIM or even Microsoft/RIS.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[zelbinion]

Documentation is what makes text files superior to the Windows registry (and possibly database configurations in general.) Many of the config files I edit on a regular basis have the documentation of what the options mean (and sometimes what options are available) IN the config file itself.

The windows registy doesn't have this. Unless you happen to have a copy of the manual handy for every little app that has polluted the registry with dwords and hex values and what these mean, the registry is incomprehensible.

Plus, if I do a man sshd_config, I get a reasonably usable manual on what I can put into the config file and what it means. Where is this on Windows? Windows help? Nope. Application help? (maybe, but probably not.)

Putting all configuration options in a registry may or may not be a good idea, but if you loose the ability to include documentation with the configuration, then IMHO it is a net loss.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[gandy909]

In the race to follow MS's "put it all in the registry" suggestions, I have seen idiot developers put FAQ's, Help files, and other such LARGE nonsense be "put in the registry", I shit you not.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[gandy909]

And you wonder why it takes Windows longer and longer and longer to boot up over time as you install more 'stuff', or programs on the sly install more 'stuff' on their own...what a great place to hide covert stuff from the user.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[shyster]

1. It is way too complex. There is no way you can understand it all or hand edit it if required.

That's a programmer problem, not a design problem. Not to mention that many config files are way too complex as well. One thing that's nice about config files, however, is that you can include comments. While you could do this with the registry (with the EXPAND_SZ, expand string, type) it's not optimal as it increases the size. And nobody does it. [aside]If programmer's don't want you to change values or the values are meaningless...why make it changeable? Why not hard code it?

A redesign of the registry with a seperate table for comments would be interesting, I think. That way, when using editing tools, the comment table could be referenced. But, when loading or executing software, the comments would not hinder performance.

If it is corrupted, your whole OS won't even boot.

While I somewhat agree on this point, I have to note that corrupted config files will also prevent Linux from booting. I don't know the format that Windows uses for the registry tables, but it should be recoverable. Also note that I've yet to see any registry corruption on Win2000+, except with HW failures. I think the inclusion of something similar to BartPE or ERD Commander would also be a worthwhile replacement to MSFT's extremely limited Recovery Console. And frequent, automated, timed backups of the registry (at least OS configuration) should be done.

3. Its huge! 45MB of my fairly clean XP box.(although it is in a domain and has policies applied to it, etc, etc, but not much software)

My Win2003 server, excluding registry backups and the user.dat portion, is only 23MB. 17MB of that is in HKLM\SOFTWARE (I have a lot of software installed). Perhaps someone handier than me in Linux could tell us what size all of the config files for a normal desktop come to (actual space on disk, ot just data size).

You can't move the registry between machines, let alone between different versions of Windows. I can move my .config file between the 2.4 & 2.6 kernel if necessary, it just ignores what it doesn't know.

While true that you can't move some parts of the registry between machines (parts dealing with hardware and the like), software configuration is easily moved. I don't recommend moving the entire hive, as it would no doubt cause problems, but .REG files can be imported/exported with no problem. And .REG files are pretty portable (and text based), though it does require some editing and checking of data types to move from NT based to 9x based machines. With NT becoming the standard, though, that concern should go away.

Several smaller independent registiries might work better. e.g. one for linux conf, one for X, one for KDE, etc. So each one has a small well definied file for all configs.

Perhaps a DBA could chime in with better info, but I think that you would then be duplicating database structure overhead on each of those files. While I see the concern of a single point of failure for all software in the machine, automated backups and sensible defaults should mitigate that somewhat.

I think the main advantage of the registry is a central location for configurable values. By using a database, you should also have the advantage of database reliability and performance. Of course, the real problem with it would be getting everyone to use it.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[shyster]

Oh, one more thing...If Windows apps would (a)only put meaningful, configurable values in the registry, and (b)cleanly uninstall themselves, the registry would be a lot cleaner and easier to navigate.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[shyster]

Another one is that there is no isolation between app components. You cannot have two versions of the same app in different file systems, with different registry keys.

Yes, you can. It requires forethought by the app developer, to seperate his keys by version, but the registry does not limit this.

Also, because write access to bits of the registry are restricted to admins, you cannot install anything complex (like a game) without admin access. Which is just silly.

And some config files are not writeable by users. Once again, this is an app problem, not a registry problem. If it requires admin access to install a non system component, then the app is coded wrong. Note that I think DirectX is, and probably should be, a system component, so you may run into trouble there.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Felonious Ham]

I wonder why Linux doesn't have a database/hashtable of the scattered config files on the system. Seems like you get the benefits of the registry (a single directory for accessing info) without its pitfalls (see posts further on).

This could also lead to a more (well, Windows user) friendly program management console. You would never have to wonder where the programs you installed ended up, or how to remove them. All this information, again, could be stored in a human readable format.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[J. J. Ramsey]

If it is corrupted, your whole OS won't even boot.

While I somewhat agree on this point, I have to note that corrupted config files will also prevent Linux from booting.

The difference is that the files that will keep Linux from booting if corrupted are mostly static. Rarely, for example, is /etc/inittab edited. So, the likelihood that these files will suddenly be corrupted is fairly low.

The Registry is anything but static. Apps write to it all the time. That increases the likelihood that one wrong write will mess up the whole thing.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[twilight30]

That's not his point. His point is that no person can comfortably read all that information -- never mind make sense of it all. When the person is the administrator of the box, as is the case with most home users, he or she has the very real problem of eyes glazing over prematurely because the information cannot be understood.

Eric Raymond talks about precisely this problem extensively in Chapter 10 of his Art of Unix Programming.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[deadlinegrunt]

No disrespect to this parent and more of a response to the parent of the thread:

Use the same config as the app does
YaST does indeed follow this rule.

never modify configuration without asking
YaST does not modify anything UNTIL you tell it too. It is noted in various places, manuals, etc. that YaST will update various config scripts as well as logging them.

display, preserve, and make editable comments about a configuration item that are placed above that item (with blank lines as delimiters).
If you make a modification to a configuration file outside of YaST then decided to run YaST on that same said configuration file(s) it will, in this order:
A) Make a backup of your original configuration with a consistent naming/location mechanism
B) If unable to do A then YaST gracefully leaves your original intact and notifies you that a problem has been encountered which it is unable to resolve "automagically" along with hints on how to resolve this issue.

I'm a Slacker myself but I usually setup SuSE for all my new Linux/Windows mentality friends & co-workers trying to switch and I personally think that YaST is a wonderful tool for their administration needs. It holds your hand when you need it and it stays the hell out of your way when you don't.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[hawkeyeMI]

I do some system maintenance (for student worker prices... ugh) for a professor at my university who insists on using SuSE for all 20 or so of his machines.

He also just switched his desktop workstation over to it. Admittedly I don't know much about SuSE (relative to my knowledge of, say, debian or gentoo) and that's partially because I've never run it on my own desktop machine.

I also set up my girlfriend with SuSE 9.0 after all the problems she had with Mandrake and Debian. She's been a good learning experience for me as to why linux isn't really ready for a lot of home users. The real problems are not the people who know nothing about computers. They are people who are not techies but need to do a lot of complicated and specific things with their computers. My gf is ADD and having things not work consistently drives her nuts.

Anyway, kind of lost my train of thought. I'm amazed at how many replies my post got -- it's been modded up but I think looking back it was nearly flamebait. I'm sure with the opening of the code we'll have the opportunity to fix any kinks in the software.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[hawkeyeMI]

What YaST needs (and maybe it has but I clicked through it without reading or something) is a nice big warning dialog the first time you open YaST saying, essentially:

THIS PROGRAM EDITS CONFIGURATION FILES IN /etc/sysconfig, AND APPLIES THEM USING SuSEconfig. If you do not understand what this means then ignore this message.

Obviously there are some issues with something like that, but one of the main reasons I left the windows world 4.5 years ago is that I want to know what's going on with my system.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[shyster]

The Registry is anything but static. Apps write to it all the time. That increases the likelihood that one wrong write will mess up the whole thing.

Apps don't, or shouldn't, be writing to the necessary keys for starting the system all the time. The HARDWARE, SYSTEM and SAM keys are seperate files on disk. MSFT may put some necessary things in SOFTWARE (I've never tried to remove it and reboot...but maybe I will), which apps do write to, but that is an implementation problem-not a design one.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Resaurtus]

Plenty of Windows apps can stomp on each other, and since the permissions are by user, not application, nothing protects them there either. Linux DBs would likely have the same problem.

Not that the idea is bad, just that there seems to be an implication that the Windows registry has it, which I do not beleive to be the case.

I dislike the registry for the following reasons:

1) It makes it to where software must be installed on the machine it is to be used on. I prefer to have light loads on the clients and store the apps on a central server. MS supports such a config to, but you have to do a light install process on each client, that usually binds it to the specific server making it difficult to rearrange you back end. An NFS mount point and configuration data stored in the directory with the app is far preferable to me.

2) I've never seen comments about settings in the registry.

3) When things are broken it's a lot harder to rescue the registry, also when the registry goes you loose the settings for everything. And if you reinstall the OS, you loose all app settings. And it's hard to migrate configs from machine to machine.

Now, could linux use a standard config database system? I'd say it wouldn't hurt, but I also see no reason to make it binary as that would hurt portability between architectures, granted, we could define the int sizes, endianess, and all that but that would make changing feild widths and such between application versions harder, text transfers with little effort. Also, a human can usually extract every last bit of useful remaining information from a damaged text file. I'd also want the databases seperated, so that when we loose one, we don't loose them all, and so that remote apps don't suddenly need local installs.

Which would leave us right where we are now. Individual text config files. Perhaps a single standard text config parsing library would do the trick for making things easier, and perhaps our config files need to be broken up better to allow apps to not have to worry about not stomping on each other. If you look at RedHat vs Solaris, you'll see that they've been doing just that to allow packages to add and remove from the various config files without fear of stomping on anything. (Hence, /etc/sysconfig /etc/http/conf.d /etc/profile.d etc...)

The text config is dead, Long live the text config. -- Res

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[steve_l]

Yes, COM stuff that you want under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT must be admin writeable; which means DX and lots of other stuff. In theory WinXP has better side-by-side stuff, but I've never seen it work properly.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Da'Rante]

The registry is a poor implementation of a good idea. IBM uses a much better, but similiar idea with thier ODM database for portions of the configuration in AIX

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[Red Storm]

No it does not tell you this if memory serves me correctly. It's just one of those things that you learn from experience. Another thing I'm learning from experience is that sometimes the /etc/sysconfig files change in their meaning between versions. For example, when I upgraded from 8.2 to 9.0 the DHCP service statement in SuSEfirewall2 changed in it's meaning. Normaly you would say "yes" and it would open up dhcp on all interfaces. Ok yes this can be a security issue. In 9.0 however yes was changed to mean only the internal network interface. That ment that my wireless segment was broken. Very bad. I discovered the problem when I was going through the new firewall config file. There it tells you there are now three options, yes, dmz and all. "dmz" opens up your dmz segment and your internal segment. However since my config file was the older version it didn't have the appropriate comments. GRRRR..... And asking for help anywhere was a pain in the ass. I'm sure that it was a very well documented change, but I don't really have the patience to sit through ALL the upgrade docs every time I upgrade.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[n3m6]

I think it's high time that the debian developers adopt a program like YaST. It would be beneficial for the users as well as the developers.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[VAXGeek]

--snip--
Actually, have you ever heard of gconf? It's like the Windows Registry, only for Gnome.
--snip--

90% of /. won't make it past this sentance.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[cshuttle]

What a spectacular idea!

In AIX, we call it the ODM, a centralized DB for all configuration items, from networking to VG's to kernel configuration paramaters.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[silicon not in the v]

I am amused to no end how Linux fans think the Windows registry is just a config file and then are surprised when it doesn't work very well that way. It's not. It's not supposed to be easy to figure out. It's not really supposed to be edited, except for very special cases.

Somehow you're supposed to know that[...]

No you're not supposed to know that. You're not supposed to be in there. If you don't know in advance the specific key you need to search for and exactly what to change it to, you really shouldn't be reading through it and trying to tweak stuff that "looks interesting".

And if I have to hear one more time about, "And if the Windows registry gets corrupted..." I may scream. I've been using Windows systems almost exclusively for over 10 years, and I've never had a corrupt registry problem. That's because I know better than to manually mess around in the registry and screw things up. You have to understand that this isn't the same type of system as Linux, and the registry is made to be updated automatically; not manually. I know that hurts you to think of using a computer that way, without exerting total control, but if you're going to use something in a manner it wasn't made for, then you have no right to complain if it doesn't operate the way you want.

OK a couple of side notes on this:
Someone briefly mentioned how hard this is to deal with in a server situation. I agree with you totally, and my take is that Windows has no place on any server. Servers need something more secure, more configurable, more controllable, and guess what? BSD and Linux and UNIX serve those roles so much better.

My other note is that I have edited a Windows registry a few times, but it was in this context. I had found a reference on the web that said very specifically, "Registry key XXXXXXXX does XXXXXX. If you change its value to XXXXXXX, it will do XXXXXXXX."

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[gnu-generation-one]

"I suggest you take that complaint up with Autodesk; MS can hardly be held responsible for how other companies store their apps' configuration settings, and the documentation they may or may not provide."

I think the idea was that config files provide inline documentation, and the MS-Windows Registry doesn't. Even if you wanted to add documentation to parts of the registry (which people don't, because they don't think anyone will edit it manually), then there's no easy way to do it. It's not like adding a few lines of comments in a text file explaining what the next thing does and what the options are.

Picking a random example (this was the first file I looked at on my system, I didn't go looking for an especially clear one), these are the first few lines of a default openoffice.conf on a Mandrake machine:

### Define font scaling (default: not set).
# If set to "AUTO", font scaling is set based on the current display
# resolution of first screen. Otherwise, this shall be a valid number.
FONT_SCALING="AUTO"

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[gnu-generation-one]

"Which is why we should move to something like XML based configuration files."

Because you'll get more typing practise using "<someitem>value</someitem>" rather than "name=value"?

Do XML users have some special keyboard with "<" and ">" where the spacebar should be, or something? I can't understand why they keep going on about files being human-editable.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[gnu-generation-one]

"If you ever want Linux to become a real destop choice to Joe User, it must get more 'newbieized'."

One of the great things about open-source apps is that while the learning curve might be steep, you only need learn it once. If you know how to do x on linux, you know it. But on Windows, it'll probably be in a different dialog box each time you get a new version.

So while it's sometimes nice to know that to set your IP address, you go to control-panel, "classic view", networking, LAN card 1, properties, protocols, TCP/IP, properties, it was in a different place on WindowsNT, and it was in a different place on Windows98, and it'll probably be in a different place in Windows Longhorn. And they'll rearrange the control panel again. And they'll rearrange the start menu again.

Today I watched an experienced contractor, a Windows programmer and MCSE, look blankly at the WindowsXP start menu for almost half a minute, wondering what he needed to do to get the control panel (despite using it all the time in Windows2000). If you know how to set an option in Linux, you could probably do it without even knowing or noticing what flavour of *nix you were running, let alone the version or the distro.

Yes, we just reformatted a load of WindowsXP machines to put Windows2000 on them. It's just that unbearable...

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[grolschie]

There already is one, its called /etc :-) However, I wish that dists agree on where some of the these files are located and what names they are given.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[cptgrudge]

Your post, here, today, has convinced me to get a second slashdot account for responding to the lies, since speaking the *truth* in a forum like this will get yourself modded down into oblivion to the likes of the trolls.

I'm not a Microsoft apologist or Linux zealot. I use the best tool for the job, and what you have posted here is false.

If you know how to do x on linux, you know it. But on Windows, it'll probably be in a different dialog box each time you get a new version.

Whether you are talking about the OS or third party software I don't know, but since there is always goign to be shitty third party software (closed source and open source) written for every major OS, I'll assume you are talking about the OS. The basic control elements have been the same since Windows 95. They changed it in Windows XP, but it takes all of 10 seconds to switch the theme to classic and everything is as it was. I've used RedHat for years, and any time I load a new version, something has changed. Granted, all of the CLI stuff is the same (pretty much the same on Microsoft, too), but (often useless) GUI tools in the default install seem to change.

And they'll rearrange the control panel again. And they'll rearrange the start menu again.

Those "Start Menus" and "Control Panels" change all the time in Linux distros depending on what exactly you install. They don't change hardly at all with each release of Windows. Sure you might need to learn where something new once in a while, but Linux is far more guilty of this than any Microsoft OS offering. I mean, config files are in different places in different distros! And they're all Linux! Oh, yeah I suppose profiles are kept in a different place Windows 2000 and after, but the user doesn't need to hunt down where some config file is to change some obscure option on some software. Or get a second NIC running.

Today I watched an experienced contractor, a Windows programmer and MCSE, look blankly at the WindowsXP start menu for almost half a minute, wondering what he needed to do to get the control panel (despite using it all the time in Windows2000).

Fuck. Wow. I have no response. Is he a moron? Is he blind? It's right there. Again, classic mode, if you really need it. Maybe he should try a google search to find that stuff out? That's what you end up doing with Linux anyway.

Yes, we just reformatted a load of WindowsXP machines to put Windows2000 on them. It's just that unbearable...

Let me guess, the MCSE contractor said to do it? Did he bill you hours for it? You just got taken to task. Maybe you should have used a little bit of scripting to reset all of those XP machines to classic mode? Problem solved.

I'm irritated. I had a not very tech savvy friend look at your post. He was confused, because, in his words,

"Windows hasn't really changed that much since Windows 95. Except that my computer doesn't crash anymore under Windows 2000."

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[MrResistor]

I've been using SuSE for 4 years now. YaST is a really great tool, and it gets better with every release, but it most definately WILL overwrite your config files. With more recent versions it isn't as much of a problem as you can configure most everything in YaST, but in older versions it was definately an issue.

Example: for a long time I couldn't get the YaST mouse config module to work write, so I had to edit XF86Config by hand to make the wheel work. That was fine, but I had to redo it every time sax ran, which meant every time I installed new Nvidia drivers for example.

That seems to have been fixed, as well as most of the other cases I've run into, but it's not perfect yet. I'm hoping that when I get around to installing 9.0 (or more likely 9.1 at this point) it'll let me enable 3D acceleration AND 24-bit color without any hand editing (needed for only one game, grrrr!).

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[gnu-generation-one]

"Let me guess, the MCSE contractor said to do it? Did he bill you hours for it? You just got taken to task. Maybe you should have used a little bit of scripting to reset all of those XP machines to classic mode? Problem solved.

Wow, technical troubleshooting by someone with no idea of the question.

The reformat XP to 2000 was suggested by a software engineer, who had already wasted most of the day just setting up WindowsXP so that it was usable. It was a permanent member of staff, doing the installations during time on his own project budget. WindowsXP machines were already set to classic mode, that was not the problem.

The problem was that WindowsXP either stopped responding, or crashed the machine, about 5-6 times in a 2 hour period. The people concerned had to get a complex system involving 20 networked PCs up and running within a few days, and wasting one of those days with a difficult-to-use operating system that was crashing even as it tried to display the control panel (this was brand-new unmodified Dell computer) was costing them too much. The decision was made to install MS-Windows 2000, which as you say, doesn't crash. [unless you run java]

There was also a suggestion that the automatic updates was causing our CPU-intensive application to crash, but we never got around to investigating this because the computer stopped responding when we tried to use the "System" control panel, and after that, we had to get rid of WindowsXP, just to get some work done.

"Maybe you should have used a little bit of scripting"

Maybe we should have learnt how to do scripting on Windows. Last time I tried, Windows scripting couldn't even reliably copy files between two machines, so it doesn't inspire me with confidence. What config file do you have to edit to make Windows appear in classic mode then? Can you save the configuration and use it on another machine?

"Fuck. Wow. I have no response. Is he a moron? Is he blind? It's right there."

And they say linux advocates were impolite about people who couldn't use their software...

Windows2000: Start, Settings, Control panel.

WindowsXP: Start... err.. what the fuck is that, there's a purple animation taking up half my screen!

To "just turn it off" involves: Right-click on the start menu, "properties", start menu properties, "classic", customise, scroll to bottom of list, small icons, ok. Now finally we have a menu which "hasn't changed since Windows95"

And it's like that for every single setting you care to mention. Want to turn off the idiotic "I'm sorry dave, I can't allow you to see the c:\winnt folder" option? Tools, "Folder options", display options, scroll down looking for boxes and ticking them.

Want to stop it making a fucking annoying jingle every time the PC starts? (and do this on 10 PCs in half a day) - start, settings, control panel, sounds and multimedia, "no sounds" scheme, click "OK", notice that "OK" was actually a question about saving the default sound settings, cancel the dialog box, reselect the "no sounds" scheme, click "no" this time, and "OK" in the dialog box. Repeat for machine 2...

This is pre-installed copies of Windows on new Dell machines which have had all their relevant software and drivers already installed. It takes about a half-hour just to make it usable.

I'm not sure how this is easier or more consistant than just copying a backup of your linux applications' configuration files onto the disk. (and before you ask, file managers, volume controls, and scheduled sounds are applications, as much as Windows people would like to think of them as the O/S kernel)

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[gnu-generation-one]

"Is he a moron? Is he blind?"

No, he's just confused as to why the mouse-movements he's used to get the control panel every day for the last 3 years suddenly don't work.

It's a minor change, I admit. But listen to the people who evaluate KDE on desktops. To them, having the start menu in a different place, or having the control panel laid out differently to windows is important enough that they wave their hands and wail that it will cost millions of pounds to retrain people to use DrakConf instead of the control panel. Yet these differences occur even within different versions of Windows.

"It's right there."

It's 2/3 of the way across the screen, about 400 pixels across and 300 pixels up. In every other version, it was on the bottom left of the screen.

(don't complain about the low screen resolution, it's a default installation as supplied by Dell)

"Again, classic mode, if you really need it."

Again, that doesn't help the first time. You have to spend the half-hour reconfiguring things to get a system that "hasn't changed since Windows95"

"Maybe he should try a google search to find that stuff out?"

You're suggesting a google search to find out how to configure Windows? This is supposed to be easy to use.

And how do you get to google anyway, if you don't have an IP address and default gateway and DNS server setup yet?

"That's what you end up doing with Linux anyway."

We're discussing Windows here, not Linux.

But if your defence of Windows usability is "it's no worse than Linux", then that speaks for itself really.

Re:YaST - great for newbs but...

[cptgrudge]

You fail it.

Most serious places set up software images of Windows first, before they deploy. And certainly before they pay a "software engineer" to "waste half a day" setting up XP. Welcome to my foes list, troll.

Gets my thumbs up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that uses a pineapple as an icon for "Misc" is alright in my book.

Re:Gets my thumbs up.

[kevcol]

Ya know, I never once even thought about it when firing up yast but yeah- it's hilarious now that you point that out! A kitchen sink icon would have done nicely as well but that being sorta logical would perhaps make that less funny than a pineapple.

Re:Gets my thumbs up.

[JewFish]

isn't that a bit fruity?

Re:Gets my thumbs up.

[ebuck]

Yes, but they have no banannas today.

Re:Gets my thumbs up.

[kevcol]

Oh wow- a flame by a slashdot reader- my life is complete; I hope yours is too.

User Friendly

[oO Peeping Tom Oo]

This looks like the least intimidating Linux setup i've ever seen! Forget sending a debian distro to less tech savvy friend, this seems like the way to go.....

Re:User Friendly

[hal0zer0]

I stuck with suse for years mostly because I found yast to be the simplest and most direct config tool in any linux. I recently switched to mepis and though I overall prefer it to suse, I've definately missed yast. If yast can be ported to debian (which I'm sure it will eventually) that would certainly make a best-of-both worlds for newbs. A Mepis live cd with a yast installer and config would be a dream come true for a newb, IMHO.

Re:User Friendly

[xoran99]

Forget sending a debian distro...

BLASPHEMER!!! Someone ban his IP!!!?!?!?!

restarting yast development

[Truval]

The problem is that YAST has been going downhill ever since Rolf Schilling left the project. Now they have to GPL it to get development going again. It was a great AI1 tool once but it has languished for at least a couple years now.

Re:restarting yast development

[rindeee]

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.

Re:restarting yast development

[ssbljk]

Yeah, using SuSE for a years made me uncomfortable knowing YaST's licence. Now, it will be ideal distro :-)

Re:restarting yast development

[justins]

The problem is that YAST has been going downhill ever since Rolf Schilling left the project. Now they have to GPL it to get development going again. It was a great AI1 tool once but it has languished for at least a couple years now.

I don't know what a rolf is but Yast has gotten better with each release.

Re:restarting yast development

[MrResistor]

I don't know what a rolf is but Yast has gotten better with each release.

Question answered. And I agree about YaST, and I've been using SuSE since 6.1. I think the grandparent is smoking crack. Or maybe just trolling. Is there a difference?

AT YAST!

[g-to-the-o-to-the-g]

AT YAST! an open source system configuration/management tool for us all!

Yast makes me happy

[tokennrg]

I've been using Yast for the last few months. I've been really happy with it. Updates are a breeze. Installing new software couldn't be easier. It hasn't missed a dependency yet. Usability is pretty good and fairly intuitive.

Re:Yast makes me happy

[Lispy]

Still I wouldnt trade in Slacks pkgtool, togetehr with zpkgtool frontend it makes my newbie friends happy.

Re:Yast makes me happy

[cdemon6]

I liked yast in the beginning (SuSE 5-7), but nothing beats apt-get... I found the long time Yast needs for even simple tasks horrible ("Launching SuSEConfig...") and the mess of (obsolete?) configuration files in /etc confusing...

Re:Yast makes me happy

[afd8856]

Perhaps you should start the TaskManager as root, to have the rights to kill a root process. Or, do what I do, ctrl+alt+esc and click on the yast window (of course, this is from my experience with various distros, never Suse, and mostly KDE). Or just run xkill :)

Re:Yast makes me happy

[WhiteWolf666]

Do this:

Open up a terminal.
Type su. Push enter.
Type your root password.
Type killall y2base

Fixed. :)

Re:Yast makes me happy

[ChrisMaple]

Yast has been a disaster for me. I've tried 2 different SUSE versions, tried installing SUSE Linux perhaps 30 times. Yast acts like it's self-modifying code created by a random number generator, never behaving the same way twice. For me, Mandrake has been the easiest to install, but I ended up with Red Hat because it was the first distribution to finally be just barely acceptable for my hardware.

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

This should cut the number of comments in any Suse story in half.

Re:Great

[bsharitt]

Red Hat: Doesn't include MP3

Debian: Outdated

Gentoo: Takes to long to compile

SuSE: Now we need a new thing to complain about SuSE.

How about that Gecko think, I never liked him any way.

Re:Great

[Drantin]

Debian woody may be outdated, but KDE-3.2.1 was in sid before the news hit slashdot... (installed it on a friend's debian sid the friday before in fact...)

Re:Great

[Hooded One]

There's still the lack of official ISOs to download, though the way things are going, that might change as well.

Novell's handling of SuSE is looking better and better.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat: Doesn't include MP3

You have to remember that Red Hat are big enough to get two complaints. One of them you already hit upon, that they're scrupulously free software only, anything with a hint of the proprietary is kicked out. The other one of course is that they're evil, just like Microsoft, and going to take the whole thing proprietary... or something.

Re:Great

[KidSock]

How about that Gecko think, I never liked him any way.

I thought they had a contest to name him and arrived at "Geeko".

Re:Great

[hetta]

SuSE: Now we need a new thing to complain about SuSE.

The best candidate would probably be the lack of a working video playing setup on the install CDs/DVD.

Downloading and installing the missing packages off the packman site works, though, so shrug.

Re:Great

[niai]

The compilation time issue with Gentoo should be less of an issue soon.

The latest Gentoo Linux Newsletter indicates that the current GRP system will hopefully be updated to allow for binary download and installation. This functionality is hoped to be implemented in 2004.1 and "The tentative release date for 2004.1 is April 28, 2004".

Re:Great

[Espectr0]

Red Hat: Doesn't include MP3

Debian: Outdated

Gentoo: Takes to long to compile

SuSE: Now we need a new thing to complain about SuSE.

How about that Gecko think, I never liked him any way.


I will try. How about the fact that you can't download evaluation isos? Maybe we should have a SuDoRa or something.

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?

Re:I love open source, BUT

[k_head]

Not really. In a recent speech the CEO of novell said that they are no longer an operating system company. They make their money selling things on top of an operating system like eDirectory, groupwise, red carpet, ximian connector etc.

It looks to me like they are keeping their focus on the enterprise which has very little use for YAST but is more then willing to pay for an awsome product like eDirectory or Zenworks.

I have spent the last two weeks banging my head against Active directory and let me tell you if my CIO said they were switching to Edirectory I would litereally kiss his ass and wash his car.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[ciroknight]

Thing is, I think Novell's got the idea. Once we can develop good, solid, working ways to install the operating system, supporting it should be a lot easier. And Novell knows that there's no reason to NOT tap the millions of people online willing to help code this platform. I personally believe Novell's trying to secure itself as the second large Linux supporting company. By buying Ximian, they gave themselves a very viable desktop, by buying SuSE, they gave themselves a stable platform. Now they just need to do the middle work such as getting it to work on all hardware, and making it easy to support. And IMO, open source is a hell of a lot easier to support, especially since the people with the problems, usually know how to go about fixing them, and will send patches.

Don't discredit the selling power either. This probably won't hurt the sells of SuSE at all, in fact, it very well might augment sales, due to the people without fast internet connections wanting to get a taste of the YaST code. Don't count on it, but the potential's definitely there. Novell's making a good move here, I commend them.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[capz loc]

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.

I disagree that this will take away significant market share from SuSE. It's not like they are stopping using YAST. And now it will benefit from the contributions of hackers around the world. An installer does not a distro make, and remember that any forks of SuSE will be GPL'd, so any features that Novell feels would benefit the distro, they could theoretically merge into the official tree. One could argue that opening up the entire distro is essentially buying Novell a development community.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[pavon]

To add to the previous three posters who all made excelent points - RedHat GPL'd most everything and provided ISO's for download, and still managed to make money off of Red Hat Linux. This will just increase install base, not decrease sales.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[ciroknight]

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.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[Zeddicus_Z]

No, not at all.

You need to realise that Novell's product is not a Linux distro - that was never their reasoning behind the purchase of SuSE. Rather Novell purchased SuSE to give them a strong, established Linux distro on which to base their directory service offering.

Prior to purchasing SuSE, Novell evaulated its position in the market. What they found was that while they had a kick-ass directory service product, they were being kicked in the pants when it came to new deployments - primarily by MS Windows and Active Directory.

Rather then attempt to re-build and re-position the NetWare brand among IT decision makers, Novell realised they could do much better by taking an existing base Operating System with widespread appeal, and integrating NDS with that.

Essentially Novell's cut NetWare* and tied its future to NDS on Linux.

Enter Linux. It had everything Novell needed: stability; maturity; widespread developer support; GPL (why write a new base when you can modify an existing one?); a wicked reputation among IT techs and, best of all, an increasingly bright future with the potential to topple all challengers.

Announcing NDS on Linux and then subsequently purchasing a well established Linux distro was, not to put to fine a point on it, absolute genious. NDS gets the best possible base, loss of market share to Active Directory is significantly slowed or halted (and eventually reversed if all goes to plan) and Novell regains the reputation it had among techs back in the days when MS' best offering was WfW.

GPLing YaST isn't a loss for Novell, it's a gain for Linux. Which makes it a gain for the base OS Novell will see increasing use of NDS on. Which makes it a win for Novell.

*Yes, Novell will continue to support and even offer NetWare-based NDS installations. But the fact remains that if all goes to plan, Novell will see its new business increasingly tied to NDS+Linux rather than the old bundle of NDS+NetWare

Re:I love open source, BUT

[jrcamp]

Personally, I don't believe Novell bought Ximian for their GNOME "enhancements". According to them, they were interested in SuSE (seen as a KDE desktop distribution) before Ximian entered the picture. The aquisitions just happened to not happen at the same rate.

As I was saying, Novell probably saw how useful the Exchange Connector might be as well as Red Carpet Express (to compliment ZenWorks on the Linux side). Mono might have also interested them in countering Microsoft's .NET push. The Ximian Desktop might be a decent side-gift, kind of like those you get when you buy stuff off TV at 2:00 am. You probably would have bought the shit anyway, but at least you get something else for your 14.95.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather then attempt to re-build and re-position the NetWare brand among IT decision makers, Novell realised they could do much better by taking an existing base Operating System with widespread appeal, and integrating NDS with that

Well, actually they DID rebuild NetWare -- modern versions are very different from the classic lightning-fast Ring 0 NetWare that owned the market back in the day. It's now a real modern operating system, but, no one cares.

The NDS-on-Linux strategy is really just correcting the biggest mistake Novell ever made -- When they promised customers the future was UNIX (NDS-on-UnixWare) and then for some bizarro reason decided to rewrite NetWare instead.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[ciroknight]

eh, I'm not gonna go into the desktop wars, saying why Novell did something one way or another, I'm not on the Board of Directors and I wouldn't know these things. But Ximian is doing a damned good job at making a desktop along with the rest of the GNOME and KDE world. By buying SuSE, they gave themselves a floor, walls, electricity, the basic framework of what they'd need if they want to move all their products to linux. By buying Ximian, they gave something to skin the house, make it look pretty, make people want to buy it. SuSE is a KDE distro, but there's no reason you couldn't install Ximian over it, and that's one reason they may have bought the two companies, to give themselves a more diverse enviroment to attack RedHat at their own game.

Could be another reason behind opensourcing YaST: give it a GTK2 interface and wala, you've got a complete, working corporate desktop platform, which of course, they can then use to sell their own eDirectory software, and others as well... It's all about building a platform. Microsoft understood this too, how do you think they became so powerful? They built two seperate houses, both very shady but they got the job done. Then they skinned one house when they realized it was about to collaspe. Moved the skin from the first, to the second, and poof, a solid platform. Now they can sell Active Directory, Office, and other software for it, and not look like bumbling rejects.

It's all about process, format, proceedure.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[mr_tenor]

Debian's new installer's self rolled, text only, very basic stuff.

The people who have been slaving night and day on an 11+ architecture installer with multiple front ends would probably not appreciate that statement, like Joey Hess and the rest.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[Hooded One]

There is a project to port Anaconda to Debian, but it's not the official installer.

Still, competition with Anaconda might be one of Novell's incentives.

Also, Yellow Dog Linux uses Anaconda.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[ciroknight]

lol, my bad.. I love debian to death, and I didn't mean it in an offensive way.. I meant that they're building an archetecture, the basic, underlying stuff that can be used to make Graphical and other installers later. It's actually a very beautiful project and is quite awesome right now, and I hope they finish it soon...

Didn't mean to come off that way... my apologies to joey and the gang..

Re:I love open source, BUT

[fuck_this_shit]

"And IMO, open source is a hell of a lot easier to support, especially since the people with the problems, usually know how to go about fixing them, and will send patches." I have no damn clue about how to solve a problem beyond mere configuration troubles. Witing a patch? in which language? I speak english and german. Oh, you mean a programming language? I guess html doesn't count?

Re:I love open source, BUT

[Asic Eng]

now frustrated SuSE fans will be legally able to distribute home-rolled SuSE isos

But they've been able to do this all along - the restrictions in the Yast license solely applied to commercial distribution. Giving it away for free, modifying the source etc - that's all been allowed already. I can see your point though, that someone selling the SuSE ISOs could reduce their sales.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[Tim C]

But apparently not enough to prevent them having to pull out of the free desktop market...

Re:I love open source, BUT

[fritz1968]

Novell will see its new business increasingly tied to NDS+Linux rather than the old bundle of NDS+NetWare

Please note that the file/print sharing portion of netware will be made available on the Linux kernal as well as the netware kernal. Admins will have the option of installing the file sharing part on either kernal/platform.

hmmm... maybe, in the future, Novell will open source the Netware Kernal?

Re:I love open source, BUT

[digidave]

They key word there was "brand". They decided not to re-build the NetWare brand.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[H0ek]

The following assumption is based on the only two things I find useful about the YaST program, the system installer and the package managment capabilities.

From the point-of-view of a package manager, open-sourcing YaST makes perfect sense for Novell. At this time, Novell has two package managers, YaST and Red Carpet. YaST is a simple "go get the RPM and install/uninstall" program, simple as in very little administrative control. Red Carpet, on the other hand, lets a service charge for maintaining RPMs, making users pay for a subscription. So, from Novell's point-of-view, making someone pay money trumps free any day, especially with competing, internal products.

Open-sourcing the second thing YaST is good at, the system installer, is just a side effect. In fact, I would expect to see Red Carpet become much more prevalent as a package manager in the future and see YaST fall behind (unless it "aquires" a really agressive set of OSS engineers).

My views do not reflect those of my employer, just the feelings of another SuSE user in the world.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[DrWhizBang]

Well, I dunno what other OS is using it as it's installer, but it's not debian.

gentoo.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[Karma Sucks]

Is that why Suse Personal 9.1 only has KDE on it?

Re:I love open source, BUT

[pavon]

They didn't pull out because it was not making money. They have said this many times before. They started Fedora because they wanted a testing bed with rapid turn around and short release cycle. While I am sad to see RHL go it really is a boon to linux to have something like Fedora to pound out bugs on all the bleeding edge software releases. Furthermore, with a short release cycle it is impractical to provide support for long periods of time - you would end up supporting a dozen different releases all at once. Lastly, they didn't have the man-power to properly develop both Fedora and RHL, so they axed RHL, thinking that a test bed was more important than a desktop product.

Again, dropping RHL was a strategic decision (for good or bad) not a failure of the business model.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[PyromanFO]

Except that they didn't pull out of the free desktop market, but the "pay for cheap desktop" market. You want their desktop? Either use Fedora or White Box RHEL. You can still pay them too.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[Jason Earl]

Exactly. Novell has plenty of good reasons to give away YaST. First of all they are seeing that RedHat's GPLed installer is already being integrated into other distributions (like Debian). SuSE and Caldera had better distributions than RedHat for years, but RedHat won because every time that someone wanted to borrow code they borrowed it from RedHat. If RedHat's installer becomes ubiquitous then it will be the one folks use, it will also receive the lion's share of debugging efforts. IMHO SuSE/Novell is already late to the party on this one. The money in Linux rollouts lies in support contracts and value-added software (think eDirectory, Groupwise, etc.). Distributions are nothing more than inexpensive marketing. The further YaST spreads the better chances Novell has of getting sysadmins hooked on their tools.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[mjm1231]

Huh?? I haven't seen 6.5, but I've been using GW 6.0 for over 2 years. If I could easily use it as a POP mail client on my Windows boxes at home, I would. It's certainly tons better than OE, and IMO much better than the bloated steaming dungheap that is Outlook. GW is also more stable, scalable, less buggy and virus prone than Exchange. Since it was installed 2 and a half years ago, we've probably spent less than 20 man hours maintaing the Groupwise system of 300+ users (Not including creating and deleting user accounts and the actual install itself). Total downtime has been, I think, less than an hour (and some of that was unnecessary reboots due to incompetence... I won't say whose ;)). Why people choose Exchange when GW is available is a mystery to me.

You are right, though, it is their stated plan to integrate it with GroupWise. Right now the only way to access GW from linux is webaccess, which limits some features.

Re:I love open source, BUT

[Drathos]

actually, the us press release for suse 9.1 talks more about gnome than kde.. quite different from the german release which barely mentioned gnome..

Ability to Adapt

[thedillybar]

You need to be able to adapt if you want to stay alive in this world. The United States has been along for so many years because of the "necessary and proper" clause which allows the government to adapt to a changing world.

Clearly Novell is taking the hint. They're aware of the fact that the world is going Open Source, and they're willing to deal with it. If they ensure a good relationship with the open source community now, they'll be rewarded with success for years to come. If they distance themselves from the open source community, like SCO, then they will make more money in the short term but be ousted in the long term.

Novell is a good organization that has been around since the beginning (or, at least, for a long time). I, for one, hope they continue to be around and keep up the good work.

Re:Ability to Adapt

[drinkypoo]

There are buildings (not very many of them) in the US alone which are older than the US government, or the declaration of independence. Probably twice as old. The US is a young buck nation with a chip on its shoulder. I mean there are nations which have been around for literally thousands of years, who the fuck do we think we are anyway?

Re:Ability to Adapt

[CentrX]

The U.S. has been operating under the same law for the longest though (or, at least, one of the longest), possibly with the exception of the United Kingdom depending on your definition of the "same". All the other nations in the world have had significant changes in type and constitution of government in the past two centuries, many in the past century. Canada, Mexico, all South American countries, all African countries, nearly all European countries, Middle East, China, Russia, India, etc. have all had significant changes to the system of government since the founding of the U.S. There is not a single nation that has been around for "literally thousands of years" without significant changes in the system of government and in the society generally.

Anyway, all looking at the duration of a system of government will tell you might be how well that system of government works and lasts. Anthropomorphizing a "young buck nation" doesn't mean anything. It is the individuals of a nation who comprise it and who would have a chip on their shoulders or the wisdom you imply that long-lasting nations have. These individuals don't inherit some magical wisdom which makes them better due to their country having the same name for a thousand years.

Re:Ability to Adapt

[drinkypoo]

You mean, we've been operating outside the law. We don't follow our own rules, and we work on double standards. Update our laws to match the reality of our legal system, and they would probably bear little resemblance to what is down on paper.

Re:Ability to Adapt

[Grishnakh]

What the hell are you talking about? Can you name even a single nation that's older than the US? I can't think of even one.

China? They've only been around since 1949, when the Cultural Revolution occurred?

Russia? Ruled by communists until just recently.

Germany? Ruled by fascists earlier about 60 years ago.

Italy? Also ruled by fascists 60 years ago. The Roman Empire fell centuries ago.

India? They've only been independent for about 50 years.

Japan? Had an emporer during WWII, and was feudalistic before that.

Great Britain? Back when the US started, they were still ruled by a monarchy, not a parliament. At least they managed to transition to an entirely different form of government without a bloody revolution, unlike most places.

So how again is the US a "young buck" nation? We've been living under the same constitution, and most of the same States (some have been added over the years) for about 225 years. What other country can make such a claim?

Unless, of course, you're just talking about how long humans have been living on a certain piece of land, but I fail to see how that has any impportance at all when all the people whose ancestors lived in the same place they do can't even keep their countries stable, and have to go through revolutions every few decades.

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.

Re:Novell's doing?

[xutopia]

Remember the roots of Novell. They are a network administration company and this is what they want to do. By making a decent, freely(or cheaply) available linux distro more popular in the business and home world they are causing a threat to the MS monoculture model and will have an advantage with dealing with all the different types of systems out there. They'll be the ones calling the shots of the network, where all really happens.

Will it actually be useful...

[bangular]

Many distributions have open sourced their installers and administration tools, but for the most part, many have been useless for other distros. Many expect the EXACT filesystem hierchy of the original distro, exact package tools, etc. etc. So if I want to make a distribution and base it on someone else's installer or admin tools, I either have to dig into their source and do it myself, or make another distribution. There are some notable exceptions (webmin being one of them). While this is mostly good news, what I question is, will I be able to use it on linux from scratch without heavy porting? If not, it's not much use to many people.

Re:Will it actually be useful...

[bangular]

damn preview button being close to submit...
s/or make another distribution/ or make another distribution almost exactly like theirs./

Re:Will it actually be useful...

[jvollmer]

Since SuSE is fully LSB compliant, wouldn't this be more of a a problem for the other distros?

If it's not Consolidated Lint, it's just fuzz!

Re:Will it actually be useful...

[bangular]

LSB compliance isn't an end all by far. Take 5 LSB compliant distro's. They will all vary greatly. Booting will vary, scripts will vary, package managers will vary, everything varies. Enough so that it makes it difficult to you other distributions admin tools unless they've taken measures to make them compatable. Many admin tools don't even have a decent ./configure script.

Re:Will it actually be useful...

[bangular]

That's the point. Why release admin tools if the only way you can put them in your distro is with a fork or heavy porting. Debian and Mandrake had to change loads of code to make them work with their distros. I would like to be able to reasonably take a distro and put Yast on it without a fork or porting. I cited webmin as a great example because it's VERY modular and has config files that you can specify how a given piece of software is installed. This means a smaller distro can have administration tools without a fork or porting.

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:Will it actually be useful...

[StarTux]

Yast is also very modular, but time will tell whether or not it will be taken up by other distro's.

Actually, I doubt other entrenched distro's wll bother, unless market forces force their hand.

Re:Will it actually be useful...

[Unknown Lamer]

Debian can use kudzu (RedHat's hardware detection stuff), but it doesn't work as well as discover does (which is the native Debian hardware detection code). Discover uses (or at least used to, I don't know about discover2) the Mandrake hardware data and maybe some code from hwdetect (not sure).

Discover + Hotplug + Udev is an amazing combination. It is really nice to be able to add a single line to the hotplug configuration to have my Neuros mount and synchronize itself as soon as I plug it in, or running a quick script after the installation of gphoto2 to add the lines so that I can simply plugin any digital camera supported and have it work (I could even have set it up to run GTKam or Kamera for me but right now I just have it set to set the permissions of the device files correctly so I can use everything when I'm not running X or logged in as another user).

Mandrake is cool because they borrowed some stuff from Debian like menu and alternatives which are really nice. I ran Mandrake 6 for a long time before I made the switch to Debian after happening upon all three potato CDs at a LUG meeting. I install Debian the October after Potato was released...it's been a fun time.

Re:Will it actually be useful...

[T-Ranger]

Providing Anaconda with a kickstart config file is not quite the same thing as building your own distro.

Re:Will it actually be useful...

[ebuck]

It is when you decide to include packages which are not available with the original CDs. And when you start repackaging the config files in servers to suit your purpose.

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.

Re:YaST vs. Anaconda?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are no longer redhat-config-* but system-config-* (as of Fedora).

Re:YaST vs. Anaconda?

[harlows_monkeys]

I don't think YaST's appeal comes from its installer aspects, but rather from its system management aspects after you get installed and running.

Re:YaST vs. Anaconda?

[joestar]

Right... When Mandrake started to ship with their graphical installer, Red Hat still used their old text-based installer.

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.

Re:Other Closed Programs in SUSE?

[j-pimp]

Quite frankly, most enterprise customers will happily pay license fees anyway.
Its not about willingness to pay money. I willing paid for Mac OSX. I willingly paid for SuSE, Open BSD, FreeBSD, tightvnc, OpenWatcom, and a few others.
However, open source is about more than license costs, its about community and better products. Their are large companies out their that face unique problems. However, their not really as unique as they think they are. Because of this custom systems to deal with individual problems evolve into things like CRM, ESM, and Groupware. Eventually these solutions get scaled down to benifit smaller entities. However, smaller companies have problems bigger ones don't. And sometimes Opensource can help to solve these problems.
As far as those that are willing to pay license fees, those that don't get open source and won't give back, sell them service contracts. This is what their expecting with a license, so give them what they want.

Re:Other Closed Programs in SUSE?

[houghi]

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?

Not that I know of. I use Yast myself since 5.x or the like. The reason I recomend it to beginners is that there are extremely good manuals with it. 1000+ pages if you buy the Pro version.

What I want to know is if they will put the ISO online now. Untill now it is possible to do a FTP install. It is not possible to download the ISO's.

Re:Other Closed Programs in SUSE?

[DFJA]

If you do an FTP install of SuSE, there are a few other non-free things that you don't get. These are things like Java, Flash and Realplayer apps and possibly one or two others. These are easy enough to download and install from their suppliers, but the licence doesn't allow SuSE to include them in the free version - I believe SuSE pays a separate licence fee to these companies to enable them to ship them in their paid for, ISO version. It's not just YaST that (until now) has made it illegal to copy the ISOs and sell them.

Re:Other Closed Programs in SUSE?

[dmaxwell]

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?

I don't think Novell is worried about it. Suse is just a platform for them to sell Directory Services and other middleware which they WON'T be giving away. More Suse installs means more data centers ready to give their payware a try.

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).

Re:Different view.

[timerider]

so it irritated you that you didnt knew what those scripts were, and what they did?
but it never occured to you to actually look into those scripts? ... nuff said.

Re:Different view.

[eddy]

but it never occured to you to actually look into those scripts?

No, not really. Not to any great extent. The impression I had was that YaST would simply "work" and that I should be able to do everything from there, making manual inspection and editing of scripts obsolete. After all, if I had to manage scripts and configuration files manually, then what's the point of YaST? I was already using slackware where I had to do pretty much everything manually - and had for years - and I liked it! I knew that to edit my network settings I'd go to /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 or whatever (I'm a debian user nowadays)

Of course I looked around. I was learning! Remember seeing prominent 'don't edit this file by hand' notices, but no real information on where/when/how it was managed by YaST.

... nuff said.

Yes, if you think that you can draw simple conclusions from a 'slice of life' that is a post on slashdot, and that anything that wasn't explicitly mentioned in said post a) never occured to the person and b) much less happened, then yes, "nuff said".

Re:Different view.

[iantri]

I happen to have the same view as the parent.

YaST makes things magically happen; however, it does so many bizarre things it is very difficult to track what is going on.

Where as in Slackware, if I want to change my IP address I can either run the handy-dandy netconfig, or edit the obvious line in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf, in SuSE you either have to click the magic button and hope it works (and I had bad experiences with this; YaST never liked my dual-head setup), or track down some obscure file in /etc/sysconfig/network or something and grimace as you edit files with a menacing "Don't edit this by hand!!" at the top of each file..

Not exactly the Second Coming

[mandolin]

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.

That is not saying much. I always felt a little sorry for the Linuxconf authors (for example), it looked like they tried to make a flexible program (at least front-end wise), but their proggy was always buggy presumably because they couldn't track all the various configuration file changes across different distributions.

It's certainly nice that Suse is moving farther in the open-source direction, though.

YEA! YAST!

[DrugCheese]

YAST is what really first turned me on to SuSE. My favorite thing about it was that I could use it over an ssh connection and configure just about everything remotely. Over the years it has turned into a create setup facility.

GO SuSE!

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.

Re:YaST over SSH

[norweigiantroll]

Okay... with X-forwarding you can run anything over SSH, what's your point?

Re:YaST over SSH

[jrcamp]

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.

Re:YaST over SSH

[Flaming_Ice]

From experience Synaptic the graphical frontend for apt-get can also be run over ssh without X forwarding. I find it very usefull when updating my router box that only has a power cable and 2 network cables connected to it.

Re:YaST over SSH

[RogerWilco]

It's one of the reasons I use SuSE, my router/firewall does not have a monitor ;-)
I could maybe use webmin, but then I need a webbrowser and GUI at the point I'm connecting from.
Complete remote admin in a nice consistent UI, and I only need ssh or putty.

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..

Re:I got on board

[ojQj]

I'm a linux newb and I started with Suse 9.0 about a month ago.

I'm still trying, 'cause I'd rather not use Windows for various philosophical and technical reasons. I'm disappointed, though.

Specifically YAST broke my network configuration multiple times by adding a network card when I configured something in a seperate unrelated part of the tool. Try to find that error as a linux newb. The apps Suse comes with have multiple minor, but irritating bugs. Mozilla's scroll bars disappear, the address manager refused to save my filters for a while and then suddenly fixed itself, some of the screen savers crash the computer entirely, and etc.

So yeah, I'm still trying, and since I am a programmer, I may just go in and fix the bugs rather than living with them. Because YAST is going GPL, I have a chance to be able to help out there. But with all the hype I'd been reading here on Slashdot about GPL'ed projects and specifically Linux, I was expecting better. Oh well...

That's probably the point.

[debest]

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

It is if it increases SuSE's penetration as a distro. Before Novell (reasonably deep pockets) bought SuSE (pretty small pockets), the distro had to be a profit centre. Now Novell can afford to allow the entire distro to be free (a la Red Hat), so that more people use it and use Novell/SuSE's server and service offerings as a result.

Novell/SuSE will want as many people to try their software as possible: making their entire distro GPL-friendly will accomplish this, along with Red Hat's official abandonment of desktop Linux. Sure, short-term this may hurt them (I was planning on purchasing 9.1 soon, I may not now). It is *because* of the long-term benefits that this makes sense.

Misleading Names

[Anonymous Coward]

For years, SUSE has considered its YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) software for installing, configuring and managing Linux an advantage over its competitors

Then they probably should not have named it with the "Yet Another" schema. It does not really give the idea to the user that the setup tool is an advantage or in any way innovative. Serious lack of confidence there.

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

Re:SaX

[WasterDave]

Tried running iTunes under Wine?

Not that I'm guaranteeing that it will work or anything.

Dave

Re:SaX

[Jeff Mahoney]

SaX2 is LGPL, according to /usr/share/doc/packages/sax2/LICENCE

Re:SaX

[iantri]

SaX is actually the part I really don't like -- I had a dual-head setup for a while and every time I started SuSE, SaX popped up and figured my settings had changed so it helpfully had me confirm everything.

Unfortunately, I was never able to get it to work right, and I was never able to get it to go away.

I tried to figure out SuSE's magic init system (It seems stuff in /etc/init.d would get executed even though there was nothing in /etc/rc.d pointing to it?? What the hell?) to prevent SaX from starting but I couldn't figure it out.

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

Obligatory

[Gherald]

You forgot Microsoft ;)

Ximian YaST

[Coryoth]

So with YaST going open source and having a much larger developer base willing to scratch odd itches, I wonder if we'll get a GNOME/GTK port of YaST that will get included in Ximian Desktop?

Anyone want to give some odds?

Jedidiah.

Re:Ximian YaST

[jrcamp]

I suppose if somebody is that bored, then yes, they could port it to GTK. But the better question would be why you would want to do it? What is there to gain besides now having two GUI implementations to support? I don't see anything.

Re:Ximian YaST

[MS_is_the_best]

No need to install QT on a gnome only desktop-system. (or even no gnome, but fluxbox, xfce etc.).

Widgets behave the same in all your applications, no need remember if it was a GTK or QT app.

No kidding, try "make xconfig" and "make gconfig" on a linux kernel (2.6.x). The xconfig just doesn't make sense to me as a GTK-user, and I can totally understand that a QT (KDE) user finds the gconfig version annoying.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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

Re:Try it!

[zeptic]

You should have read yesterdays edition.

;o)

Re:Try it!

[wohlford]

You can find install CDs on SuSE's site. It's basically just a boot CD that runs a simple configuration utility and then downloads and installs everything. Once done you have a complete SuSE Linux system. I don't mind paying, but free beer just tastes better.

Be kind. Use a mirror.

Re:Try it!

[RogerWilco]

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

Same thing here, I bought 7.3, and am now waiting on the SuSE 2.6+KDE3.2 AMD64 version to go SuSE+Athlon64 for my desktop ;-)

This is great news!

[Phidoux]

It will only serve to strengthen Linux distributions and make the adoption of Linux on the desktop a less daunting experience for existing Windows users. Great stuff guys!

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.

If giving away the installer...

[Kjella]

...is a make or break for a Linux distro, poor them. The installer is, in my opinion the least important part of the system. As long as the installer doesn't crash, doesn't ask obscure questions without giving a default and gets me to a point where I can run up2date, yum or apt-get I'll make it, if the OS is worth it.

And if you're talking about newbies, they won't install OSs. My dad still needs hand-holding if there's anything more complex than doubleclick->next->next->next->finishe d. Either it'll come preinstalled or someone a lot geekier will install it for him. Either way, it's not important.

Kjella

Re:If giving away the installer...

[ciroknight]

I don't think this is true either. An installer is a vital part of the whole solution. It gives you a chance to orient yourself with the operating system, to get the look and feel of things down, to understand what all is being installed, and to get to know the technologies at work. Microsoft honed the art of installing years ago, and ever since they've used the installer as a great billboard for their operating system. But since anyone who's likely to be looking at it is upgrading, reinstalling, or something of that like, it has to be friendly because they're probably already pissed as it is.

It's kinda like buying a new car. Shiny and pretty, plenty powerful under the hood, nice leather interior, cd player, all the good stuff you find in cars today. But would you buy that car without test driving it? Would you buy it before you knew how to drive it? Now apply this to an operating system, would you install it without getting some kind of a chance to orient yourself with it? Would you nosedive into it without having the slightest clue of what you're doing? Better yet, should you have to?

The installer's not all of the game, but it's defintely something you want to get right. If you get it to where even the most experienced users will feel just as at home as a complete computer newbie, than you're probably on the right path. YaST is close... closer than Anaconda IMO, but, as with everything.. could user a little work. Thank goodness now we get the chance.

Re:If giving away the installer...

[b17bmbr]

an installer and a test drive are totally different. you don't play with the OS on install. (except for that tetris game on the old caldera, remember that one?) a test dirve is like knoppix, et al. where you actually use the OS for real stuff. i would argue that an installer is totally not relevant to a distro. how many people install windows? few. installation of an OS should never be a factor. period. what matters is what happens when you use the OS. desktop linux will happen when it comes pre-installed/configured. until then, when you have to get a CD then do your own install, it is a niche OS on the desktop.

Re:If giving away the installer...

[Hooded One]

It's more than the installer. YaST is also the configuration tool for a multitude of system settings, and package manager.

Total newbies won't install *any* OS. However, modereate newbies and intermediate users can benefit from excellent installation and configuration tools.

were you really joking?

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

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

Re:were you really joking?

[Gherald]

Yes I was. My link is funny, yours is perverse ;)

Re:were you really joking?

[gantrep]

I found yours to be trite rather than funny, and his to be funny.

Re:were you really joking?

[Gherald]

Yeah mine was trite, just poking fun...

But the open source award is certainly ironic, which is why I joked about it being perverse.

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[account_deleted]

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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.

Re:YaST support for console

[jrcamp]

There's another thread about this, but I'll repeat myself for the hell of it: yes, if you run YAST from the command prompt you get a nice little ncurses GUI where you can do your deeds. Pretty nifty, if I say so myself.

Re:YaST support for console

[Jeff Mahoney]

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.

Re:YaST support for console

[rsax]

Yes it works even if you don't have X installed.

$ 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.

Re:YaST support for console

[houghi]

$ rpm -qa | grep curse

Intsall 'pin' and then do:
$ pin programname. It will give you a LOT of info.
While I am at it. If you need to compile something yourself, use checkinstall instead of 'make install' and make your own RPM files.

Re:YaST support for console

[dmaxwell]

The actual heavy lifting is shared, and the front-ends are only interfaces to use it.

This is HUGE point that a lot of whingers missed about Debian's new installer. Everyone is whining that "it looks just like their old one". It will be easy to hang whatever frontend you on top of it while having other features like hardware detection and modular maintainability. The new "installer" is really meant to be "installer infrastructure".

YaST is not one of those

[r_j_prahad]

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.

In Sun Java Desktop too

[mcbridematt]

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

Re:In Sun Java Desktop too

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun's Java Desktop is a variant of SuSE.
That's how.

Re:In Sun Java Desktop too

[mcbridematt]

Possibly. Having never used SuSE, I can't really speculate. The demo CD I have here is based on Morphix and looks nothing like a typical Linux distro. But I personally think it's for secretaries only

Re:In Sun Java Desktop too

[R3]

Bu using SuSE 8.1 (or was it 8.2?) as the base for Java Desktop - essentially adding Sun logos and some extra content to it.

Re:In Sun Java Desktop too

[ron_ivi]

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

Indeed, considering that they made this work well with the debian-based morphix-core module.

"Sun's director of Linux Software Engineering contacted me and apologized, ... they used our Morphix-base module

Looks like Sun's doing a good job at bringing together the best of all worlds.

Re:In Sun Java Desktop too

[Nailer]

Because Sun Java Desktop is a modified version of SuSE Linux.

Compare to redhat-config-*

[Micah]

I've never used SuSE, but for those who have used both, how does YaST compare to all the redhat-config-* packages? In my experience they are pretty good.

Re:Compare to redhat-config-*

[rsax]

I don't have much experience with Redhat but one thing that I like about YaST is that all the configuration can take place by just typing yast at the command line. You don't have to deal with separate redhat-config-* packages, just one command and from there it's all very simple.

Re:Compare to redhat-config-*

[mcrbids]

I don't have much experience with Redhat but one thing that I like about YaST is that all the configuration can take place by just typing yast at the command line. You don't have to deal with separate redhat-config-* packages, just one command and from there it's all very simple.

Well, perhaps it's because I've been using RH since 5.1, but I've not used a "config tool" in years. Too damn annoying.

I like /etc/sysconfig/iptables and a few others - making stuff like this (EG: firewall) into dameon-like config files makes it easy to manage these kinds of things - but the GUI configurators are never good enough for me.

I mean, let's say you want to allow SSH connections from any of 5 distinct IP addresses, or anywhere in a class C network, but nowhere else?

Or, you want to reject SMTP connections from a backup relay unless the primary relay is offline, at which point you want to script an update to allow SMTP?

There are a zillion scenarios like this where the simplistic GUI tools just don't cut the mustard...

Re:Compare to redhat-config-*

[Micah]

You can click "Start here" in Red Hat and get a folder with all the config programs in it. Pretty slick.

YasT may be good but

[Agent Orange]

I just can't stand the SuSE mentality - it annoys the shit out of me, in the same way that windows and OSX annoy the shit out of me - it gets in my way and tries to hold my hand. Just leave me the hell alone! If I want to set up a bazillion bloody environment varibles etc, I'll fucking-well do it myself!

Global configurations should be minimalist. If you want a special protect-me-from-the-nasty-computer config, fine. But I don't, so piss off and leave me alone.

SuSE and Yast have done some great stuff in the way of installed, and opening up is a Good Thing(tm). But I'll never enjoy using suse unless they change their mentality...

AUS0.02c

Re:YasT may be good but

[Visceral Monkey]

The problem is SuSE and distros like it are NOT suited for you. You sound like someone who wants to do everything themself. Try slack, gentoo or arx, not SuSE. Use the CLI, it sounds like what you want and need. Or, as an alternative, a version of YaST that has various levels of interaction, like simple, moderate or expert.

Re:YasT may be good but

[Anonymous Coward]

The 80s called, they want their interface back.

Re:YasT may be good but

[StarTux]

"The problem is SuSE and distros like it are NOT suited for you. You sound like someone who wants to do everything themself. Try slack, gentoo or arx, not SuSE. Use the CLI, it sounds like what you want and need. Or, as an alternative, a version of YaST that has various levels of interaction, like simple, moderate or expert."

Not really, he just needs to know more about the tool at hand, how to switch it off would be a good start.

How to switch SuSEconfig off (which is the one doing the changes).

manually edit /etc/sysconfig/susconfig and change the line here:

"## 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""

You see the problem is people do not take the time to check or ask questions, just assume. By the way, in that file is a ton more options.

Re:YasT may be good but

[SneakyNinja]

Ahh, the beauty of Linux.

Don't like SuSE, fine, use another distro.

Personally, I like SuSE and YasT. It does all the crap jobs for me, whilst allowing me to go mess with stuff when I feel the need.

I paid cash for SuSE Pro 8.2 and will most likely stump up for 9.1 too.

Sounds like you should piss off and leave SuSE alone, not the other way around ;-)

Re:YasT may be good but

[halsathome]

I think you've got the mentality wrong.

The architecture supporting YaST is (very simplified*) like this:

1. Yast edtits the files under /etc/sysconfig.
2. Yast runs /sbin/SuSEconfig which will run:
3. /sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig."whatever". These things read the /etc/syconfig files and produce app-specific configurations.

"whatever" is things like apache, gdm2, tetex and loads of other stuff. Sometimes all of them gets run, but most will not actually do anything if nothing has changed. (md5 checksums ar kept for lots of things).

Several of the files under /etc/sysconfig have variables to turn off parts of the SuSEconfig machinery, meaning that the actual config files of the apps will not be changed. That way you can make your own changes stick, while still using YaST for most things.

You can add your own custom stuff to the /etc/sysconfig/* files, and add calls to custom stuff in the /sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.* scritps. Also when I've changed my /etc/sendmail.cf without turning off YaST processing of sendmail, SuSEconfig writes its version in a different file, allowing me to do a diff and maybe incorporate what I like in the actual sendmail.cf. These kinds of things will usually be disabled by an upgrade though, so it's best to keep custom stuff in separate files and just insert a "source" command in the stuff that belongs to YaST.

* "very simplified" means e.g that some things under /etc/init.d read the /etc/sysconfig/* stuff directly, YaST may stop/restart a service that is about to have its config files changed, and that there are lots of nooks and crannies in YaST I haven't stumbled upon.

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.

Re:Portability

[cozziewozzie]

Well, SuSE is not as platform-agnostic as Debian, but they do have x86, AMD64, PPC and SPARC versions, which means that YaST is quite likely portable enough.

Re: So, why does Mandrake choose to make their own

[dan_sylveste]

Because it works better than RedHat's and SUSE's. I paid for RedHat and SUSE, but still use Mandrake since stuff like file-sharing works.

Installing no problem, eh?

[Xystance]

Fair enough...

Then we look at YaST's tools for maintaining a system. Easy to understand, more comprehensive then the KDE Control Panel... that's something anaconda doesn't even touch.

I didn't think about that. :)

So, either you use YaST, or you edit config files manually, but no combination of the two really works.

(Walks off to ponder)

Re:Stop with this newb crap

[StarTux]

When you get a new system, please learn how to use it. If something annoys you, find a way to switch it off, or change its behavior.

Actually, if you change a file directly SuSEconfig can tell that has happened and will not touch it in virtually every case that I did that. But, the best approach is to edit /etc/sysconfig files directly, you'll love how it streamlines things. That way you will have more time for other things.

Why do people insist things are great for newbs when it makes ones life easier, and makes it quicker to get to the point where you want to be. Why should I spend two hours setting up a TV card manually in /etc/modules.conf for instance, just to watch TV on my Linux box?

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:Open Source Oscar of the year goes to Novell

[rsax]

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.

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.

Yast-Very modular

[StarTux]

Don't know if anyone has actually developed 3rd party modules for Yast, but it seems very possible. Would that mean IBM for instance could place in an administration module into Yast and make it publically available? Was this actually possible before going GPL?

Whilst it removes the main gripe people had about SuSE (the second being ISO's, beyond the live CD) what will this change? I don't see Mandrake, or Redhat ever switching to Yast, why would they?

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[account_deleted]

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Yast...A Great Tool for everyone

[Elusive_Cure]

I've been using SuSe since it's 7.2 version, constanty upgrading on every major distro upgrade (7.2 - 9.0). Throughout all these releases i've seen Yast growing from a weird config manager to a robust application that takes only 5 steps to deliver a fully working linux environment with all the devices autoconfigured and working. It's dependency checking is brilliant as well as it's package management and configuration abilities are competent enough to not fuck things with your installation. I shared my SuSE 9.0 DVD with a ms advocative friend and flatmate and watched him changing lanes through the last three monts. All I have to say is WELL DONE+THANK YOU SuSE (novell) for this great operating system, i'm looking forward to upgrade to 9.1 .

Re:YAST vs urpmi

[King_of_Crunk]

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.

Perhaps Novell will make ISO's available.

[rindeee]

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.

Re:Perhaps Novell will make ISO's available.

[ahillen]

I believe that YAST was the "big reason" that SUSE (my personal favorite Linux distro) didn't have ISO's for download.

Why? I don't see how the (old) Yast license would have had any influence on that matter. Certainly not for SuSE, but also others could distribute Yast freely as long as no money is involved.

Re:Perhaps Novell will make ISO's available.

[rindeee]

Correct, but I believe it was still forbidden (somehow or another) to post ISO's for download. You have always been able to make copies of the CD's and give them away (or even sell them for the cost of the media) and install it on as many machines as you like. Again, the source of all the consternation over YAST was the confusion.

Re:Perhaps Novell will make ISO's available.

[ahillen]

Correct, but I believe it was still forbidden (somehow or another) to post ISO's for download...Again, the source of all the consternation over YAST was the confusion.

Well, I used to believe that also, but after reading the Yast license I realized that nothing was preventing me to give away Yast freely, including making it available freely on the net. I then wrote an email to the SuSE customer care and asked why it would be illegal for me to offer SuSE ISOs for free download. The answer was that technically it is not forbidden if it is really a free download with no strings attached. I'm still not sure if I misunderstood the mail or got a wrong answer, because I can't believe that there are no ISOs available just because SuSE chose not to offer them themselves and nobody else bothered to clarify if they could... ;)

Re:Perhaps Novell will make ISO's available.

[myLobster]

"...and I will continue to buy the retail packages for the great manuals..."

Not to mention the stickers too.

The anouncement to GPL YaST is really great news an is hopefully an indication of how savvy Novell are.

Linux distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried SuSe not long ago when my brother had it in his comp. I didn't like YaST at all, it was too "eyecandy" for my taste. I'll stick to urpmi.

But GPL'ng YaST is of course good news.

This is actually why I use Linux over Windows; lot of more choices :)

Re:YAST vs urpmi

[pe1chl]

>YAST? well, the day it actually works, and does something useful I'll consider it.

Another requirement is that you actually study what it does to determine if that is useful to you.
Up to now you apparently did not do that.

YaST does not, like some older Unix administration programs, take over all administration from you and prohibit your own changes.
For example, you can add users with commandline tools like useradd or by editing the 4 relevant files, and YaST will have no problem with that.

OT: ftp_conn_track?

[GileadGreene]

Why don't you just use the ftp_conn_track module for ip tables? Then you don't need to leave large ranges of ports open, just the standard ftp port. Once a connection is established the connection tracker will manage opening and closing of ephemeral ports.

If Novell is going the GNOME route...

[Ho Kooshy Fly]

With Ximian in hand, and word of GNOME afoot doesn't it seem logical that YAST will go through a major change and go the GTK/GNOME route? It seems to me that YAST on SUSE with integration with KDE may become unsupported. This is too bad becaues in SUSE 9 it is pretty slick for those users who are not experts. I wonder what kind of future the whole of GNOME/Ximian/SUSE will hold...

-Fly

rpm -R

[RedLaggedTeut]

YaST isn't just an installer.

Wouldn't it be enough to have a switch for the program rpm which simply installs packages recursively ?

So you could do(pseudocode)
rpm -R --explain --force -package penguin --rpmsource /mnt/dvd/rpm
then if you like what happens
rpm -R --force -package penguin --rpmsource /mnt/dvd/rpm

Where explain will explain what rpm will do and what dependencies --force will break(if any)

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"?

zast ruley! SaX sucks.

[parabyte]

(On the german keyboard, y and z are reversed, there is a QWERTZ instead of a QWERTY keyboard. Therefore, since many years you can also type "zast" to start yast.) IMO, GPL-ing yast it is a good decision, making it possibly an even better tool than it already is. The major troublespot is the integration of X-Windows configuration via SaX, which still regularly failes when using the NVIDIA drivers. p.

Yes!

[w_stormchaser]

Finally! Actually I kinda doubt, that distros would want to have yast, because most of distros already have a system manager one or another kind... But upcoming distros with poor or no sys manager could use that (I would love to see yast getting into gentoo, for instance.. Configuring X has been always a killer) Thanks, Novell!

To switch off yast (SuSEconfig in fact)

[StarTux]

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 vs SAM

[ojQj]

Any idea how they accomplish this?

I'm a Linux newb and I've started with SuSE. One thing I noticed though was the similarities between YAST and HP's SAM. Both can run in terminal mode and in GUI mode. HP managed that by creating a language called ObAM (I worked on it a little in an internship there years ago). ObAM could be interpreted to a useable interface in both modes.

Does YAST do something similar?

Just curious...

Wrong headline

[jayminer]

YaST has already been open source. It was just not GPL'd.

Yast for Kernel update?

[wolfdvh]

Is there a way with YAST to update the kernel version if you have no special tweaks?

I've always appriciated how with a command line switch, you could run RH up2date and have it add a new kernel to the list for bootup.

I'm not trolling for 'real mean roll their own' replies, I would just like to know if it can do the RH up2date trick of updating the kernel version at the bootup screen.

Re:Yast for Kernel update?

[Junta]

Yes, even rpm without up2date or yast will do this...

We need to get the apps devels to participate too

[Per Abrahamsen]

The whole idea of having the GUI config tools work "on top" of independtly developed applications, written with no thought of GUI, or even non-nerd, configurations, is a loss-loss situation.

What we need is for a standardized way for the application developers to communicate the possible configuration choices and their legal values to the config tools, and for the tools to communicate these choices to the applications.

The interface must be extremely simple to use and light weight in order to be acccepted by the application developers. And it must be stand alone, not depend on any particular framwork or other libraries. The primary interface should be to the application developers, because it is their accept we need first. Our ultimate goal, to serve the users, will have to come next. We won't serve users by having a cool interface that no applications support.

I believe it can be done, though. I got such an interface accepted among Emacs developers, and I suspect similar tools are accepted in the limited domain of KDE and Gnome. That such a tool can exist in the whole domain of free software, is shown by the acceptance of the gettext interface. Those free software projects that do localization, tend to use the gettext interface. Because it is so simple, non-intrusive, and toolkit independent.

Re:registry - one advantage... permission

[raju]

The Windows registry is nothing more than a glorified file system. It is in fact a set of files that gets loaded. But, there is one difference: permissions. One can assign full NT ACLs to registry keys. One cannot lock down a part of Apache httpd.conf file on Unix, for example. One would have to set file permission on the whole file which, in some cases, is too coarse-grained.

NT did not bother too much about locking down the registry though the facilities were there. Sure, there were whole trees that were off-limits to mere mortals but they could have done a much better job. I hear that Windows XP does a decent job in this department.

Fantastic News

[Kumochisonan]

I have recently come to realise that one of the problems with Linux, and one of the reasons why most ISP's won't support it over the phone is because of a lack of standardised configuration tools.

I am hoping that this Open Sourcing of YaST will mean that other distros will begin including it as a configuration interface, making it a whole lot easier to support.

I am aware that almost every distro has it's own friendly GUI tools for config, but what we need is a standard tool across all distros, so that companies that offer support over the phone can easily train first-liners on how to support customers running Linux.

Re:Fantastic News

[emtboy9]

We had that once. It was called linuxconf. And it really really sucked. In fact, when I was providing linux end user support, one of the first questions I asked users was: "Have you used linuxconf?" and if so, the first suggestion was always rpm -e linuxconf.

YaST is a LOT better than linuxconf was or ever will be, BUT it still has some issues to work out. However this can only be a good thing, because now, there should be a LOT more people looking at YaST and working on fixes and features.

The problem I see is this: There are no real standards. Red Hat starts services one way. SuSE another. Debian yet another, and so on and so on.

They sometimes put things in different locations (/lib v /usr/lib) and sometimes do things completely different.

I realize that each distro HAS to provide some difference, or some sort of value-add to survive. Traditionally, its been support for peripherals, better filesystems, support for more processors/ram and package management. Debian has .deb, Red Hat has rpm, and so on.

Those are fine, but until all the major distros focus on standardization, at least at the base kernel and filesystem level, Linux will not succeed like it most definitely could. That is why you can go to rpmfind and find the same program compiled for 4 different distros... more in some cases. There are kernel differences, compiler differences, and more that all conspire to keep each distro at the "just different enough" level to prevend such things from functioning.

Personally, I would like to see all the major distros (the smaller ones would probably follow suit on thier own pace) settle on ONE kernel version per release. ONE GCC version, ONE library version; you get the drift.

After that, everything else is a value add, and can be what makes one distro more appropriate than another for a given use. But at least at that point, you will be able to use binaries from one distro on another without having to worry if 2.4.21 in Red Hat is really 2.4.21, or is it 2.4.18-lots_of_patches_and_Red_Hat_tweaks.

Re:Fantastic News

[Junta]

There is a disconnect of interests with the dream....

Users/administrators/etc all want Linux to be a consistant platform, with healthy competition and every provider essentially being a drop in replacement for another, to keep things perfectly competitive.... Competition is good for consumers.

Distributors care about the proliferation of a Linux platform.... *THEIR* Linux platform. If RedHat acheived 95% total market share, would SuSE be any more happier than MS having 95% market share? Benefits of being closer to SuSEs solution and therefore a cleaner transition for those with RedHat experience is offset by the solutions being so close together, there is no point of deviating to SuSE. Particularly among the more successful commercial Linux vendors, there is a minimal, political interest in embracing standards, but they want their config tools to be a) better than the rest and b) not easily usable with anything but their own distro, so as not to lose market share they could hold..

Re:Fantastic News

[iantri]

This is, of course, what the LSB and FHS are for.

I can't say I particularly agree with some of their design decisions, but they are trying to create a Linux standard.

Afaik, SuSE is LSB-compliant. (The /etc hierarchy certainly looks like it)

Red Hat/Fedora implements some if it, and Mandrake has it as an option (see the "LSB" option in the installer).

Re:Fantastic News

[Pros_n_Cons]

If we wanted standards why aren't we all using anaconda, kudzu, kickstart. All were the best before other distro's got into the game with thier own tools. Many distro's already use some of this software but nobody wanted to show red hat was the innovater so they started thier own projects, now those projects are almost, or just as good but look at all that wasted effort when we could have standards for hardware detection, installation and configuration deployment. All three of these tools would be non-issues today, debian, suse, mandrake all on the same page. What is the point of GPL if we don't use it. It's too late now, everyones tools are on par with YaSt that want to be.

Re:Stop with this newb crap

[AlCoHoLiC]

Because watching TV makes you dumb, while messing with configuration files is good brain excercise.

can the distros now learn to work together?

[protomala]

For me the big question is: now that yast is open-source, will other distros follow and open their tools, or will they start working together on yast? The amount of reinventing-wheel the distros have done all this time by creating their own tools is s complete shame. For me, I want Mandrake to change to yast asap! Why? Mandrake is a KDE distro, but their tools are in gtk, they promissed to switch to QT, but never did, now the tools are there, they should only get them. (they can even keep their installer that is great IMHO, but use yast as tools). I use Mandrake, and would love to see them cooperating into making yast great so more distros could take advantage of those tools. Anyway, little distros probally will start using yast as default tools too, I belive.

Re:registry - one advantage... permission

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. Just use XFS and add things to the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ folder. (On Apache 2.0 at least).

All the permissions you need.

Hope it helps for Mandrake

[Maljin Jolt]

because mandrake drak* tools are the most buggy thingies from the whole distro, for ages.

Future!

[tacocat]

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.

Re:Future!

[crusher-1]

"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."

YaST (ver 1) is obsolete and no longer used. YaST2 is the "only" YaST that exists today (save those run fairly old versions of SuSE). If in a shell, when "yast" is called it is merely a symlink to /sbin/yast2, but in the ncurses form. Whereas calling "yast2" brings up a QT/gui version (unless in init 2 or 3).

Cheers

Re:Future!

[g0bshiTe]

Parent post hit the nail on the head about X11. I have had more problems trying to configure X11 than with anything else on my system. I run a TNT-2 32meg video card in my SuSe box, with hardware acceleration disabled because I can not properly configure X11. I have downloaded the current X11 pakage for the nVidia card, but I am afraid to install it as my current configuration works fine. I see no point in messing with a good hting. And as I posted elsewhere on this, I still use a Windows box for games, so I really don't need the graphics acceleration. Though it would be nice to have my Linux box 100% configured and working properly. I think it futile though just to do all that to watch videos.

Re:Future!

[dodongo]

You're right--SaX2 is a GREAT X11 setup tool; it's saved my skin several times. The picture on my LCD is now unquestionably better in X than in Windows. That's absolutely awesome!

YaST is a great tool, and it's nice to see SuSE / Novell / Ximian all playing nicely together. I think you're on the right track with this (that is, that we can expect to see more powerful tools on the way from SuSE, probably in SL-10), and frankly, I'm *proud* of SuSE for GPL'ing YaST.

That's a pretty profound statement. I'm PROUD of a company whose software I'm using. I think they're doing things right. In my experience, their software runs better on my HW than anyone else's, and gives me the tools I want to get things working. They've now locked me in even more by demonstrating a commitment to my recently-found (in the last year), and dearly-loved new F/OSS community.

Cheers!

Re:Future!

[evilviper]

but few can get the X11 configuration working correctly.

That's simply because few people know to use: xf86cfg -textmode

Once you tell them that, any idiot can setup X properly (unless they have some really advanced configuration changes they need to make)

Re:Future!

[foobsr]

Anyone can configure a Linux machine these days, but few can get the X11 configuration working correctly.

Ahem! of ...

the world population
.
.
./
.
.
LINUX nerds

CC.

Re:registry - one advantage... permission

[smittyoneeach]

No, but if you had such a requirement, you could trivially implement something where unprivileged users could say what they want in, say, their home directory, and then have a sufficiently privileged user merge their stuff to the main httpd.conf, which is easily commentable and versionable, BTW.
Possibly something similar could done under 'doze, but just the thought of the burnt offerings involved makes me shudder.

Re:registry - one advantage... permission

[ebuck]

Apache supports the inclusion of files into it's (normally) one config file format. This means that you can use the Include directive to move a portion of the config file into another file on the file system.

These other files can have different permissions, and if ACL is your cup of tea, you can set it up and enjoy. Or you can use the standard user/group/other UNIX permission set as you like. How you slice and dice the file is up to you.

But who would really do this anyway? Apache is a server, and you don't take a server and distribute the configuration between a group of people, each that can only touch these bits, but not those. You give the power to the administrator of the machine (or the server).

With a fragmented server configuration you run the risk of someone setting thier own slice of control to some nonsense which stops or cripples the operation of the entire server. With the apache http server, those who need to tweak their own hosting permissions can do so without fancy ACLs and a fragmented config file system. That's what .htaccess is all about.

Mabye there's a time and place where your argument will be much stronger, but Apache's HTTP server isn't the best example for proving your point.

Plan 9 (the OS, not the movie) really turned everything into a (very glorified) file system. It was interesting, but after using it, there seem to be limits as to what is comfortably put into a configuration file system, and what is better off in a plain vanilla config file.

NewtonOS took a completely different approach, it didn't have a file system per se, rather it had a underlying database. Configuration issues did not disappear, but they were much easier (my opinion) to handle. Some found it inconvienent to have documents be entries in a database, but that may have been a side effect of it's novelty.

Perhaps the real problem is that file systems (in general) make lousy databases? Look at the clunky implementation of the registry "find" function, and you'll see that an elegant solution is begging to be found.

Re:Stop with this newb crap

[ebuck]

It's unfair to assume that everyone can solve all of their problems without some sort of assistance. The process of moving from "newbie" to "seasoned" is one of mostly learning where to look and which mistakes to never make.

Along the way you'll gain insight into software operation, networking, and a whole lot more. But expecting people to just edit files directly assumes a lot. They need to find a text editor (not the more familiar word processor), be able to use it, and undestand both the domain of the problem and the config file syntax.

This can all be learned, buy when it's not cost effective, why bother?

Computers are not just for the trained, they are being thrust upon the unwashed masses too. Expecting my stepfather (and avid linux fan) to learn about /etc/sysconfig files would be unrealistic, as he's much more valueable as a CPA. Nor does he expect me to understand the subtlies (and yes, they do exist) of tax law.

Yes, he has fixed his own problems, but often he'll just invite me over to save him the six or eight hours of tinkering time compared to my five minutes. That leaves him with eight extra billable hours. God bless CPAs, they have a good idea about cost/benefit ratios, return on investment, and they insist on paying (something) for everything, even if it's family.

Newbies are not idiots, they are often just people who don't find value in learning about a craft that we care dearly about. Thank goodness, or we'd all be punduits without even a choir to preach to (or employ us).

Registry is just a dumbed-down filesystem

[Chuck Messenger]

The Windows registry is quite simply a primitive (i.e. dumbed-down) filesystem. There's nothing particularly special about it. On the other hand, there's plenty which is un-special about it. For one thing, there's no permission control. By contrast, since Linux uses the regular filesystem for program settings, permissions can be fine-tuned. In other words, what you're asking for:

config db that uses permissions so one program can't overwrite another's data without proper access

is something which Linux currently offers (you need to set up the permissions yourself to achieve whatever goal you're after), but which Windows doesn't, exactly because of its registry.

There are plenty of other reasons to prefer to use the regular filesystem for program settings, rather than a registry.

For example, (good, modern) filesystems are instrial-strength, designed to survive dirty shutdowns, etc. By contrast, a registry is prone to getting corrupted.

Futhermore, if your settintg are in a regular filesystem, you can access them with regular programs (e.g. grep -R pattern /etc, or some complex filter chain -- the regular-old UNIX tools which you (should) know so well). By contrast, you will need special registry-specific programs to do anything with the registry. These programs are going to be very primitive, and you're not going to be as fluent with them. In short, they will suck.

Yet another reason: if the settings are in the regular filesystem, then they can be easily changed remotely. E.g. you can ssh to the machine, then vi /etc/something (i.e. text-mode). If your registry-editing program is a GUI (which is likely), then you won't be able to do this.

In a similar vein, suppose your GUI frontend (e.g. your X server) won't work. If your settings are all in regular files, editable by regular programs, then there's no problem -- just boot into text mode, and find/fix your problems using textmode programs (find, grep, vi, etc). If your settings are in a registry, then you won't be able to use your regular GUI registry-editing program. If you're lucky, you'll have some even-more-primitive textmode program you can fall back on. If you're unlucky, you're hosed -- you get to re-install your OS!

Re:Registry is just a dumbed-down filesystem

[jfx32]

"...For one thing, there's no permission control"
Actually, you can set permissions for registry keys.
see here

Never?

[Phishcast]

I use a customized XF86Config file, and several times using YaST it's overwritten it. At the top of XF86Config it reads "Created by SaX2, don't change this!" or something similar. Problem is, their tool can't do what I need it to do. I end up keeping a copy of my good config and copying it over the one that YaST/SaX2 likes to overwrite.

Yes, but

[smartfart]

You won't be able to do that unless you're root.

However, you can still install many applications if you're not root, by installing them to your home directory. Generally, source code is compiled by running

1. ./configure
2. make
3. make install

Generally "make install" will put stuff in /usr, /bin, etc., but you can sometimes choose to install the program elsewhere besides the default location by running "make install DEST="/path/to/some/other/directory"" (this syntax may not be totally correct, I'm shooting from the hip here), which can certainly be in your home directory.

Many simple apps can be installed this way, but larger and more complicated ones might not. YMMV.

Re:Yes, but

[sprprsnmn]

if you pass a --prefix= argument to the ./configure step, it wil install the app to where you set the prefix (defaults to /)

good news..

[Anonymous Coward]

I see a lot of debate here centering on whether hand-holding gui apps like YaST are a good or a bad thing..

Getting back to the point of the story, as far as config apps go, YaST is pretty good - deals very well with dependency issues for rpms and seems to deal well with all the configs on my 3 SuSE boxes. Being able to call YaST through the X gui, through the ncurses gui or directly from the CLI means that it remains useful even on a P233 laptop with 96Mb of memory.
Regardless of inter-distro bitching and l337er-than-thou user-hostility fans, the GPL'ing of YaST is Damn Good News - there's lots of good tools within YaST, and if it's GPL you can of course keep the bits you like and dispense with those you do not..

Better Headline

[gr8_phk]

Should read "YaST to become Free Software". Whenever I see something like this, I always want to check which license they're using so I can determine just what that means.

YAST

[g0bshiTe]

As a SuSe home user for 3 years, I say it's about time. This tool has made SuSe the perfect distro for a Linux newb such as myself. Had it not been for the YAST module I believe I would have spent countless hours, trying to figure out configurations.

Though the documentation was lacking in the SuSe distro, YAST made my transition from a strictly Windows user to a multi OS user. I now use Windows strictly for playing those games that refuse to work proerly under WINE. PSSST MESSAGE TO THE OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY. How about improving the video acceleration of Linux! We need better games. And yes I did read the GAMES FOR LINUX ARTICLE

At any rate the article made no mention of YAST2 though. Is this to remain outside the GPL?

Proprietary is good...

[CyberdogOSX]

...so is OSS.

both have their place. we have to stop thinking that for OSS to win, closed source must lose.

i think Apple has the right idea. they help where they can without giving away the farm.

Apple also showed us the way by realising the for them to win, it didn't mean MS had to lose.

open source isn't right for every product. insisting that it is only makes the whole OSS movement look unreasonable. insisting on either one completely stifles inovation.

that's right. no proprietary, no businesses developing software for a profit.
no OSS, no open source inovations happening outside company control. the two drive each other.

one more example of how everything must be balanced to work. if one or the other were on top, we would be in a very different and unhealthy place right now.

Re:Stop with this newb crap

[hawkeyeMI]

I've spent plenty of time learning how to use Linux. What I don't like is when GUI config tools are entrenched in the OS second-guessing everything I do and changing what I've done behind me.

Apparently I lack the relevant understanding of the SuSEConfig system or something like that.

I don't like this kind of crap and that's why I don't use SuSE. I have to administer some SuSE machiens though, and that is the extent of my experience with it. Give me Debian or Gentoo any day.

Moving YAST to the GPL

[Hut_Mul]

I think moving YAST out to the GPL is a great move by Novell. I've been a big fan of the SuSE distro for awhile. I thought It was the best installer out there. Now it can be used by anyone slapping together a distro. That's really good news.

It's come a long way since those "text menu" installers I remember dinking around with. (Most recently Debian.)

Well, to be fair, I do remember hearing that Debain has improved the install process.. tho I haven't tried it.

This is great...

[Glamdrlng]

S now does that mean every post in the last Suse article that flamed Suse for Yast being closed source can be modded down -1, DOH?

X-SuSe user....

[Rebel_Rebel]

While I feel GPL is a good thing for yast I'm highly annoyed that Sun Sparc has been dropped from support from this distro as well as others. Annoying trend as more commercial companies buy a Linux dist that they drop Sparc support.

Oh, wise fortune teller,

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

because people will prefer free software. The trend is obvious.

Fact 1: There is no such thing as a free lunch.
Fact 2: Water is for all intensive purposes free for Americans. How much money was made in the last year selling int at $1 per half liter?
Fact 3: There is no Fact 3. This Fact makes no sense, just like the rest of this post. So when you think about what you have read remember, there is no Fact 3.

Re:Oh, wise fortune teller,

[DrWhizBang]

Fact 1: There is no such thing as a free lunch.

but there is a "Free" lunch. not "free", "Free"

Fact 2: Water is for all intensive purposes free for Americans. How much money was made in the last year selling int at $1 per half liter?

Water is free, but having clean tasting water, in a bottle, cold, right here - ah I would pay for that. As I would pay for coffee, which is not free. Would I pay for bad coffee, lukewarm, that I need to go home to get? No, and neither would I pay for Microsoft products.

Fact 3: There is no Fact 3. This Fact makes no sense, just like the rest of this post. So when you think about what you have read remember, there is no Fact 3.

A wookie, you say? On endor! Pardon me, I must agree with you ;-)

The only reason I said "will prefer" and not "do prefer" is that people have not causght on yet. They do not know understand that free software is better, because they do not understand software. But looking at IBM, Novell, Apple, Redhat and others, These companies are selling free software - successfully! And sales are growing, along with the services layered on top, and the hardware revenues that are generated by the sales (i.e. the "oh, do you offer linux? let's talk." factor.)

Re:Score -1: Asshole

[Glamdrlng]

And I suppose it does need more people like you?

Quick answer

[silicon not in the v]

I asked yesterday about any open source apps that can do what YaST does. Wow, answers come faster than I thought, and I didn't expect it to come in the form of a whole article. [Homer voice]Mmm, YaST with apt[/Homer voice]

Torrent?

[MyHair]

I want to try it, but I'm having trouble googling for a torrent. From what little I've read it's okay to freely (as in beer) distribute the YAsT binaries/isos now, right?

My Linux newbie buddies always go for either Red Hat or Suse. I disliked Red Hat after trying 6.0 a while back, but I avoided Suse because of the closed source YaST. I'm a Slack / Debian kind of guy, but after seeing how easy and slick Knoppix was I'm eager to try the unencumbered Suse/YaST.

That's Odd. . .

[MyHair]

$ rpm -qa | grep curse
ncurses-5.3-110
yast2-ncurses-2.8.20-3

Hmm. Odd; I recently there were a lot more curses in Linux than that.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It was never CLOSED source, dammit

[justins]

Just because the license annoys you doesn't mean it's not open source.

wala - ACK!

[ChrisMaple]

It's "voila" with an accent mark over the 'a'.

Re:wala - ACK!

[Optic7]

LOL... maybe you will get bonus points if you can actually name what accent exactly to use over the "a".

Yast vs Apt

[xtronics]

I've used both - and once I realized that the wajig command makes apt-get user friendly, there is no comparrison (I tried Suse first, but now I use Debian).

See http://togaware.com/wajig/

and for a GUI tool - (sort of a "Add/or Remove programs" on steriods) look at synaptic.

Apt-get has been GPL from the start once again showing that Debian is the heart and soul of Linux/OSS/GPL/GNU.

Bingo

[T-Ranger]

eDirectory runs on Windows, Netware, many distros of Linux. Groupwise, same deal. Damm near every product they ship (that isnt Netware) runs everwhere. And everything they ship WILL run on Linux come "Netware" 7.0.

OS? What are you talking about? Who cares about the OS?

IBM is making a profit on OSS

[metamatic]

Not very many companies are making a killing on OSS right now. Some, like IBM, are subsidizing it from their HW sales.

IBM's middleware strategy is based on the WebSphere products, which are based on Tomcat, Apache, and Eclipse. That middleware business alone is worth over $11 billion a year, and it is profitable. And that's without considering any money made by the consulting part of the company, which is separate from the Software Group.

IBM keeps careful track of exactly which parts of the company are making money, and has clearly shown that it is willing to sell or abandon those (like Aptiva, its typewriter business and its hard drive business) which aren't contributing enough to the bottom line. If IBM wasn't making a profit by selling software solutions based on OSS, it wouldn't be doing it.

Re:IBM is making a profit on OSS

[shyster]

IBM's middleware strategy is based on the WebSphere products, which are based on Tomcat, Apache, and Eclipse. That middleware business alone is worth over $11 billion a year, and it is profitable.

Of course, Websphere itself is NOT open source. And, it's really based on Java, which again is NOT open source (though IBM would like it to be). It's HTTP server is based on Apache, but what makes it unique is in Java. And, as IBM has said, Websphere is a commercial product and it would be unrealistic to open source it. And Sun has stated that IBM's idea to open source Java is "bonky".

Still sucks

[metamatic]

A month or two ago I tried SLES 3.0, and I couldn't get YaST to do online updates at all. I finally gave up when it presented me with a dialog box that said "ERROR: Completed." after it hadn't done anything.

Perhaps open-sourcing YaST will help get the bugs fixed.

Scared of Debian?

[Symb]

Debian is up in the distro polls. They are releasing a new next get installer/packager (that is targeting all distros).

I'd say novell wants a piece of that action.

Right....

[jack_csk]

As I said before, I am still waiting for them to release ISOs... As soon as I know that they are releasing the free ISOs (just like other distros), I will buy a copy of SuSE. :)

Re:pico

[jack_csk]

In a Stallman perspective, you have to put the prefix GNU before NANO, so it will be GNU/NANO instead.

I am still waiting to see a GNU/Stallman :)

Re:Amen

[Grishnakh]

This is silly. Linux users can't be expected to be well-versed in arcane Windows features any more than Windows users can be expected to know to use /sbin/ifconfig to find their IP address.

I don't use Windows much at all, but last time I watched it boot, I don't recall seeing a message saying "press F8 for failsafe mode". However, on my Suse 9.0 machine, there's an explicit option on the bootup menu for failsafe mode.