Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2702 mails)

[dragula@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Benjamin A. Rosenberg)]

Hello,

        Disclaimer : I just had a co-worker tell me we use NT because it's
easier to develop for and were lazy *grin* .. Unix is better though ..
so I was a bit miffed .. so just read and it's just my 0.02 :)

> I admire the sentiment, but that doesn't quite cut it! I've discovered
> to my cost that SuSE is not an easy distro. The English manual has lost
> a huge amount in the translation from the German. It's full of typos and
> poorly phrased sentences. It's also got hopeless technical errors. (If
> you follow the section on installing a new kernel, without noticing the
> errors in the filenames, you'll end up in a right mess). The setup is
> very difficult compared to Caldera, and when I did it, it dropped out
> saying it was done before it had offered to set up the X server.
> Fortunately I knew to type XF86Config, but I wasn't too impressed. YaST
> can be a pain, although that may be because I'm not used to it. I was
> trying to set up a remote printer yesterday, but couldn't get it to
> work. It took a while before I realised I needed to restart lpd, and
> YaST didn't seem to to offer an option to do that, unlike RHL's printer
> config.

        I do agree that SuSE doesn't hold your hand through configuring
software, networking .. and hardware ... this much is true .. NOT. I
have 4 network cards in the machine I am working on and it was a
breeeeeeeeeeeze to get going w/ yast. I had Redhat 5.2 and it was just a
horror to even get " Linuxconf " to bring up a ppp connection I had to
resort back to ezppp which kicks ass! If you have been with Unix for any
amount of time then you should basically have figured out what files
need editing and where .. oh .. I forgot, you like it to work with you
and do stuff FOR you. Linux is getting better as a whole in doing this,
but man we have people who love this stuff developing it .. not people
w/ Steve Jobs or Bill Gates paying tons of cash and working people 90
hours a week to get it done. Linux has come a long way since I first
started messing with it around 1.1.13 and it's waaaaaaaay easier to get
things configured in then say Solaris 7 X86 .. try to get a ppp
connection or have support for a Diamond Viper 550 ... or hell, even
have the support for IDE drives over 8.0 gig ( which is Solaris's limit
). Don't tell me it's too hard, either you like a challenge and when
it's all said and done it is uber stable .. or you don't. I really don't
mean to be an ass, I am just tired of people who think that everything
that's worth doing should be easy and be had with little effort ..
that's so bullshit. I personally will help you in any way I can, and if
I don't know enough about what your doing .. there are a lot of people
here who are so nice sometimes it hurts.
 
> I don't consider Linux distros to be 'market leaders' or otherwise. SuSE
> is probably fine if you like doing it all the hard way, and could be
> considered a market leader over, say Debian. That's great, but SuSE is
> not the leader in the 'easy' market place. In that case, compatibility
> with other distros might be nice when trying to do something in the most
> straightforward way.

        SuSE is straight forward .. YaST gives a better description package by
package of all the things on the cd's then Redhat ever did. You might as
an FYI just try hitting F2 when a package is highlighted. I know this is
a pain cause SuSE gives you so much bloody software compared to Redhat
and hot damn..it's $50 cheaper then Redhat ... WOW .. who would have
thought .. some effort went into giving you everything you could
possible need so you don't have to figure out how ppp works then spend
hours on a 56k modem downloading rpm's or source .. who would have ever
thought ;)

> Specifically, I wanted XEmacs, which I couldn't find on my SuSE 6.1
> distro. I already have the RPMs for RHL, but was faced with a blunt
> "Requires Redhat >= 5.0" type error message when I tried to install it.

        After reading this request I popped in my SuSE 1 CD and fired up YaST (
there's that word again ) and ya know what .. I found the package in
this really weird place .. it was in " e emacs " the 7th category down
.. who would have ever thought it would be under emacs .. you SuSE
bastards ...  you hid it on me ... :P

        The error about Redhat is a message they put in it. If you force the
rpm in and it goes into standard directories and the executable is in
your path .. no worries my friend.

> I tried to find a SuSE 6.1 XEmacs RPM but no luck so far, although I
> might have found a 6.0 package on rpmfind.net. RHL RPMs are easy to find
> for just about everything because that tends to be the distro which
> package creators start with. I also like linux-conf, which I am now
> starting to think may be a RHL specific tool. That's not on the SuSE CD
> either.

        If you like linuxconf then use it .. just go get it. All it is .. is a
front end script writer so you don't have to fire up vi. :) Yeah, when
one distribution uses something and others don't that's called a
proprietary tool. YaST is such a tool, but every mag, internet site an
their mothers vote YaST to be the best proprietary tool ;)

> That is the definitive answer, but it's a bit like hard work. And for
> something like XEmacs, which is HUGE, it's not an easy solution. It
> requires time (hours on my old machine :-( and a lot of disk space which
> I don't have. All I want is the basic package, one 'rpm' command, and
> go!

        This was answered above...
 
> I'm still not sure about SuSE. I actually went out to the local store to
> buy RHL6 yesterday, with the intention of giving up, wiping the disk,
> and starting again. But they were out of stock on RHL so I'm not quite
> sure where to go now. My feeling is that I need something that tries to
> work with me a bit more.

        BTW .. Windows NT works with you a bit more .. when ya try to delete
something even as admin it asks you are ya sure? Work with SuSE and it
works back .. it's like the song says .. you get what you give .. and it
sounds like you aren't giving much a chance .. I have never used xemacs
.. but I found the package in about 30 seconds and well, I wanted to see
what all the hubbub was so while I was there, I installed it :)

        Have patience my young Jedi :)

-- 
Ben Rosenberg
<A HREF="mailto:dragula@xxxxxxxxxxxx";>mailto:dragula@xxxxxxxxxxxx</A>
'Powered by SuSE Linux'
--
To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@xxxxxxxx with
this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e
Check out the SuSE-FAQ at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/";><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A">http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A</A>> and the
archive at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html";><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A">http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A</A>>