Hi: I am considering switching distributions to Debian or something that is more obedient and less pseudo-intelligent than Suse. I had horrible headaches with 8.1, that are still causing me trouble today after almost a year, since my wife just tried to install a new version of gaim. She clicked the downloaded RPM in Konq., got a button that said "Install with Yast" and when she clicked that and put in the root pw, Yast stupidly installed the gaim package from the installation CDs, not the downloaded one, AND Yast installed Suse's useless non-working mplayer on top of the vanilla mplayer that my wife spent hours figuring out how to compile by herself so she could play Windows media which the Suse mplayer cannot do. This same behavior was dealt with regarding Mozilla, since the Mozilla that came with Suse couldn't do Java, but trying to install the vanilla Mozilla that works resulted in a dependency battle with Yast, which tries to reinstall Mozilla every time we try to use Yast to install software. I generally use the CLI for this stuff, since I know Yast is stupid. Hopefully now my wife will have learned her lesson as well. Trouble is, when the distribution does this kind of stuff, it makes me unable to trust it in a very fundamental way. How can I be sure that ANY time I run Yast, it won't try to bludgeon my system with its unintelligence? I simply don't know, that is the answer. The point of this is that, I wonder if you can assure me that Suse 8.2 is any better, or will I go through the same frustration of finding that Suse did something to break most of the useful software, so I will want to upgrade it to the vanilla stuff on the net, then find myself in a battle with dependencies and Yast trying to reinstall things all the time? I simply cannot tolerate this behavior any longer. -- _____________________ Christopher R. Carlen crobc@earthlink.net Suse 8.1 Linux 2.4.19