The fourth alpha release of OpenSUSE 10.3 has been released. “Inclusion of YaST Meta Packages handler; instLux allows users to start the Linux installation from Windows; we have removed zmd from the distribution and concentrate now on the tools opensuse-updater and zypper; TeX Live replaces teTex; first parts of KDE4svn entered Factory, its games are installed; OpenOffice.org 2.2; GNOME 2.18.1; improvements to our init script starter startpar to reduce boottime; first changes to support Sony PS3; Linux 2.6.21 with an updated AppArmor patchset.”
I’ve been using 10.3 Alpha 3 for about a month now and I think it’s better than GM10.2. Looking forward to this Alpha release and even more to Oct. when the the final version is available. Great job, openSUSE developers!
Suse 10.3 won’t be released until October??? Guess I may as well start testing 10.2 now since that’s what alot of my machines will be running for the next year. The summer is upgrade time where I work.
suse 10.2 start very slowy and don’t react fastly…
i have good hope for 10.3… i use suse since 7.x
haven’t tried OpenSoft since 9.2 but looks like there moving in the right direction i just hate/loathe YaSt , its a pig
If you don’t like YaST: just don’t use it!
Can you name better graphical configuration tools for FTP, LDAP, NFS, display settings, … under Linux?
I don’t think that Mandriva has that number of configuration tools available…
You can like it or not but in my opinion YaST is the most comprehensive set of graphical configuration tools available today.
YaST will be integrated in Gnome with 10.3. That means it has the same style like application browser and Gnome control center and looks very good.
I know that some of OpenSUSE tools are not available under Mandriva, but I can’t recall any of them. FTP, LDAP, NFS, display settings are all available under it.
yast rocks.
Personally, YAST was the original reason I flocked to SuSE back in “el dia” when I first started attempting to use Linux. It was the reason I stuck with it until SuSe9.2 (Started at 7.0) By then I had learned the bash/CLI well enough to compile and configure things manually and didn’treally need it anymore.
I still really like YAST and feel that while it works well, it is sometimes too slow to fire up or do its job; especially when doing things like installing packages. If something takes more than 30 seconds, I now find it easier to drop to the command line and do it myself, but I like the luxury and polish of YAST
so much that I always give it the benefit of the doubt and let it have a shot at a task before I dig in under the hood. (That is a luxury you don’t readily have in windows!)
That being said, I have a question: I thought they open sourced YAST. That being the case, why has no one picked it up and vanilla-ized it so that other distros can make use of it? I think a few years in the open source community might make it a bit leaner and meaner. Does anyone think a leaner YAST would increase Linux adoption?
Edited 2007-05-17 13:43
Yes, I too think better, more standardized configuration tools would allow for easier migration to linux. I have advocated ideas such as this with respect to package management, and this is the response I got: “Linux is about choice, and the moment you start to standardize you reduce choice, and you take away the very aspect which makes linux what it is.”
Obviously, people take the “choice is good” mantra way too far. Like it or not, linux is driven by the commercial distributions. Novell, Red Hat, Mandriva and the like invest a lot of money into linux by employing people to work on Gnome, the kernel, KDE, etc. In trying to make profits, these companies differentiate themselves not only in the services they provide, but in the products that they offer. Because of this, Red Hat wastes time and money in developing Pirut/Pup when there are many other options from which to borrow in the OSS community. There is this perception that one must be different the competition. This is stupid in my opinion, but it explains why the major linux distributions only are willing to borrow and share to a certain extent.
So, to answer your question standardization (to some extent at least) won’t happen until people realize that too much choice is bad and that companies stand to gain more when the differentiate themselves based upon quality of servies provided as opposed to software provided.
YaST is a lot faster on 10.2 than it used to be, and I guess 10.3 may speed things further. YaST is not really the creaking behemoth it used to be and OpenSuSE have clearly taken on board the need to quicken it all round.
I’m not a programmer, but I’m wondering whether YaST is tied to SuSE’s very particular back-end, and this is why no one really seems interested in adapting it for another distro. All those special SuSE scripts, all the sysconfig and SuSEconfig stuff (see the folders in /etc). Disentangling all this and then bolting the resulting GUI on to another version of Linux could be a Herculean task. Debian, for example, does everything differently and has a very different philosophy when it comes to the organization/content of text configs and where they go in the heirarchy. Even after that, a distro that adopted an open-sourced YaST might find itself being called a Little SuSE in the market’s view. Next thing Microsoft knock on the door with a special voucher deal for you haha.
The amount of work in opening YaST and making it universal must be at least as much as writing your typical KDE or Gnome-ish hardware control panels.
For all that, YaST is serious kit by any standards, surely, and SuSE have always seemed well aware of the importance of grooming and growing it.
Do you still have to delete beagle to stop it running like a 3 legged dog?
I don’t know. But it’s common sense not to install/use things you don’t need.
While it may be an incorrect default for you (and me too btw), it’s easy to kill it. Thta’s what I did with all the latest versions so far, including the zen updater stuff, mono.
But unfortunatelty it keeps re-appearing with KDE updates because openSUSE designates it as a ‘suggested’ pacakge in one of the kdebase packages, so it keeps getting pulled in by default. It irks me that I have to manually de-select beagle/mono in Yast updates because suggested/recommended packages are brought in automatically, since there is no option to ignore suggested packages vs. required pacakges, or to store package locks etc.
The package dependencies are something that needs to be addressed in openSUSE, a fact that has been acknowledged but is a signficant undertaking given the legacy nature of many of the core packages. Personally I find it ridiculous that the most basic text-based install will bring in Xorg and Gnome dependencies, or that you can’t uninstall firefox without breaking Xorg dependencies etc. (And before somebody chimes in, this has nothing to do with rpm vs deb; it’s more akin to the meta packages you find in distros like *buntu that can bork your upgrades if removed so effectively force you to settle for default package installations)
The dependency handling is fine for Suse’s historic “kitchen sink” approach but they are looking to streamline the installation and offer some much lighter default options, so I imagine we’ll see continued improvements in this area as 10.3 progresses.