On Tuesday 27 February 2001 22:13, Hirendra Hindocha wrote:
Hi all ,
I've been seeing a lot of praise for Suse Linux on this list and I thought I'll present my dissenting opinion. I recently bought Suse Linux 7.0 Professional to install on our Dell system. I wanted to run IMP (Web based email) on this server to provide access to all of our employeess access to email (both web based and via imap). The installation itself was flawless (kudos to the team) but it is after that I ran into problems. I tried to install the IMP from rpms and ran into tons of unresolved dependencies. I then tried to download the source rpms and tried to install everything but that ran into problems too. I was basically looking for - Postfix + IMAP + Postgres + IMP . I didn't have any problems with the first 3 but the last one gave me ulcers. In frustration, I installed RH 7.0 and everything was up and running in no time.
Suse is good with stability, installation and configuration but it is the lack of rpms that creates problems.
BTW, if anyone can recommend a good Web-based email (like IMP) for SuSe, I'll be more than happy to revisit this distribution. For the moment , I use a combination of RH7.X, Suse 6.x (firewall) on our network.
Hiren, I don't know the solution to your problem, but did you attempt to contact SuSE's support? I don't even know if they give support for that kind of issue with the "installation" support. I would hope they would. As far as dependencies go. I've seen a few instances where there is no way to get things installed without breaking dependencies. That bothers me a lot. I don't believe this is unique to SuSE. I've been thinking about how nice a dependency graphing tool would be. Something that could show all the dependencies associated with a given package and could be expanded to any depth. Perhaps it would be useless, but I'd love to see an attempt to produce something such as this. You raise a good issue. I do like SuSE, and I think 7.1 is a very positive step in the right direction to get a better handle on all of these configuration issues. The complexity involved in these systems is mind boggling. I believe there is probably a good OO paradigm that could help alleviate some of these type of collisions which all of us hate. I've been kicking around some ideas along these lines. In my vision, each application would be treated as an object with public, private, and protected members. different components of the system would deal with configuration by passing messages to methods. I've a lot to say on the issue, and hope to find some time to write this up in a formal way. Right now I need sleep. Steve