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

[Lynn Danielson]

Sorry, I fat fingered my previous reply, sending it prematurely.
Here's the rest of it. fwiw....

On Friday 25 April 2003 12:36 pm, Lynn Danielson wrote:
> 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
> an improvement on their past installation options.

The package conflict/decendency resolution handling pop-up
windows that YaST now employs aren't, in my opinion, as bad
as Dennis Powell makes out in his review.  But they did remind
me of Solveig Haugland's comment on OOo, "Germans don't
make interfaces." ;-)

> 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.

There are a couple other configuration issues that have gone
less than flawlessly, but they haven't been anything that I
couldn't live with out and I'm confident that with a bit of
time I can probably work through those issues.  Do I wish that
YaST would have just taken care of everything for me -- yes.
But overall I'm fairly impressed at the amount of hand holding 
that YaST provides.  I for one will bare with its shortcomings
for now and hope for continued improvement in the future.

I still like the SuSE distribution and plan to continue using it as
my primary distribution.  I currently find myself a little less likely
to recommend the distribution to others, especially newbies. An
important point to consider when choosing SuSE Professional
is that it's designed as a workstation distro.  If the cutesy console
in a frame buffer stuff drives you to drink, then you should look
elsewhere for a distro.  

I'm seeing efforts to improve ease of use and the look and
feel more polished.  While SuSE may still have some bugs to 
work out, I like the direction they're going.

Lynn