[CLUE-Tech] Man, this guy really hates SuSE 8.2!

[Lynn Danielson]

On Thursday 24 April 2003 10:59 pm, Jed S. Baer wrote:
> This article really gave me a laugh.
>
> http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=333
>
> So, is YaST really that bad?

YaST has been going through a number of changes lately and
it seems to be suffering from growing pains.  While for the most
part I like YaST, it makes most of the admin tasks I care about
trivial, I've had a couple of issues with it in both 8.1 and 8.2.
Nothing that would convert me from using SuSE mind you, but
I could sympathize with the writer of this article on a couple of
points.

I upgraded to SuSE 8.2 on a couple of my machines this past
week.  This upgrade went smoothly on my work machine.  I
had resolved the CUPS misconfiguration issues that had
plagued my machine since I upgraded to SuSE 8.1.  This was
SuSE's conversion to CUPS release and it did a poor job of it.
I couldn't get things like changing the media size from A4 to
US Letter from within YaST.  However, going through the CUPS
web configuration page worked just fine.  I also had to hack
my a2ps paper sizes to get them to work and I've never had
to do that before.

On my laptop, the upgrade was less pleasant.  My biggest
problem initially was with video.  It configured my display for 
vesa fb 800x600.  So, I fired up sax2, SuSE's XF86 ver 4
configuration utility and changed my display settings to what
had previously worked with SuSE 7.1.  The display settings
seemed to change fine but my machine hung hard on the
next reboot.  This problem may be an XF86 issue, I don't 
know.  I do know that the settings I was previously using for
an IBM 1024x768 TFT display now seem to be locking my 
machine. But the vesa frame buffer works ok, so I'm  using that now.

The next thing that bothered me was choosing packages.
This article is right on about that.  I was amazed at the 
number of things that I thought would get installed that
didn't.  YaST helped me search for them on a one by one
basis and install them, but I found this annoying and not
a clear improvement on their previous installation options.

Next was the wireless nic card.  YaST detected the Prism
2.5 PCI card and set up orinoco modules for it, but I was
never prompted to enter ESSID, crypt keys, etc.  Through
the SuSE support database I was able to find out which 
config file was supposed to contain this setup info and I
am happy to report that my wireless connection is working
great, but I still consider this a blemish on YaST's 
performance.