At 13:53 29.09.00 -0700, Michael Hasenstein wrote:
1. Yast2 is still relatively useless for anyone who fiddles with the package-configuration. In particular, I miss yast1's ability to detect package conflicts, and I found no function to save and load an established configuration. The excellent hardware detection helps when I install on laptops (which happens once per month or so, on average), but I'm forced to first do a minimal installation and then use yast1 to postinstall packages.
This means it's useless when I'm to upgrade my 30 desktop machines all in one go - I need to spend too much time in front of each machine.
You're using the wrong tool. If you do that many installations have a look at 'alice', a SuSE tool for automating a large number of installations. It's included in the Prof. Edition.
This is good and useful advice. Thanks. I'll have a look at it. On the other hand, you do not address my complaints about the problems with yast{1,2}. And as I go along, I'm noticing more and more problems, introduced with SuSE 7.0. Whoever concocted the idea of moving the package docs, for instance? All of a sudden /usr/doc/packages was empty, and everything was in /usr/share/doc/packages. While the packages themselves, it seems, as a rule expects to find the doc in /usr/doc/packages. Things like that are a total pain for anyone who edits their own configuration files. I've had to spend quite a bit of time with my httpd.conf now, because of this. Going from SuSE 6.4 to SuSE 7.0 is going to be a lot of work for me. So much that I'm considering sticking with 6.4 and just continuing to upgrade the kernel and any software SuSE provides on the ftp sites. The latter is an excellent service, as long as you ignore the web page listing the up- grades.
I dislike the fact that Tekram's driver for their 390U2W SCSI-card isn't included (it's been out for ages). Having to compile new kernels on a variety of different machines is a pain, but now it's got to be done. I'd hoped 7.0 would prevent the need. But there isn't even a precompiled kernel with both SMP and AMP support.
AMP or is it APM?
APM. Sorry.
Forwarded to the responsible person. 'Isn't even' is a litle tough, the number of SMP machines where you'd want to enable APM is tiny. I'd certainly NEVER add APM to a production system. And how many people have SMP laptops?
I wouldn't use APM on my servers. On the other hand, I find being able to shut klient machines _completely_ off with 'shutdown -h' very handy. I also hope to get support in apmd for suspending the monitor. For both of these things, as I understand it, the APM kernel is necessary. And on klient machines with two processors, therefore, APM+SMP is needed.
Use ALICE!
I probably will, if I decide that the upgrade is worth it. Thanks, Michael. Bjørn -- bjornts@mi.uib.no Sysadm, Math Dept, University of Bergen -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/support/faq