Star Moving from Debian To SuSE Linux and Back Again
Linked by Leo Spalteholz on Wed 9th Jun 2004 07:59 UTC
SuSE, openSUSE I'm sure everyone is sick of reading reviews of Suse 9.1 by now but perhaps this one is a little different. This is not an ordinary review in the sense that I don't provide lots of colourful screenshots, or ramble on endlessly about the included software versions and other trivial things. Written from the point of view of a Debian user trying to switch to an "easier" distribution, I concentrated on how Suse stacks up compared to some of the traditional Debian strengths.
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Suse's quirks
by doggedblues on Wed 9th Jun 2004 09:48 UTC

I have inherited a Suse server and I am experiencing some of the same issues that this guy has.

http://packman.links2linux.org/

To everyone who is telling this guy to visit the pacman page, you will see that the number of packages available there is very limited compared to Debain's repositories or Mandrake's contrib and plf repositories.

Additionally, there is no easy way to install software from the command-line with the officially supplied tools. And running yast through the ncurses interface is not the same thing as apt or urpmi.

I have been given a Suse server to look after and while it has been reasonably stable, it is full of funny and not so funny quirks.

Instead of putting Apache's directory in /var/www where most distributions put it, Suse puts in /srv/www/htdocs. Ok, fair enough, I can adapt to that.

But sofware installation of stuff that is not on the CDs is a huge pain as are a few major things. By default, it makes all new users part of the same "users" group, which means that all users have read and write access to each other's directories. If you go to Yast and choose the paranoid setting for file permissions, this still does not change the default behavior and users can still read each other's files.

Can someone tell me how to fix this, other than me creating my own /etc/skel settings? Why don't they do it like Mandrake or Redhat or Debain,where each user is self-contained unless you otherwise tell it to share stuff with other users?

I want joe user to belong to the joe group by default and nothing else.

I need help from a Suse user who can provide a workaround for this issue. Thanks