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YaST to Become Open Source
Space_Soldier writes "According to News.com, YaST is going open source: 'For years, SUSE has considered its YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) software for installing, configuring and managing Linux an advantage over its competitors and forbade them from incorporating it into the products they sold. But with the new plan, to be announced Monday at Novell's Brainshare conference, the company will release YAST under the GPL, sources familiar with the plan said.'" Several years ago, when I first used YaST, I found it to be superior to the rest of the all-in-one administation tools around at the time. It was generally regarded as a great program, save for the licensing. Today, that's no longer a concern.
Let's hope they can bring the famed Novell ease-of-use to Linux.
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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.
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?
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
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
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.
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.
The best way to support the US war effort is to continue buying American products.
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.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
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.
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.
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
Janie took my gun...
$ 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.
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.
The registry?
.config file between the 2.4 & 2.6 kernel if necessary, it just ignores what it doesn't know.
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
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.
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.