May 16
Well, last night I finally installed Suse 10.1. It’s the same as ever for me - there are things I love and things I hate. Foremost in the “things I hate” is YaST. I wanted to update some software and found these options under the “Software” section in YaST:
10 options is way to many. Let’s look at the choices that I would have to explore before doing the equivalent of an “apt-get update.”
- Online Update
- Software Management
- Online Update Configuration
- Online Update Setup
- System Update
I know they do different things, that’s the point. Can’t this be simplified? Make it so I don’t have to discover what is going on. I really like the “Software Management” option. Isn’t that what I’m already doing here in YaST?
Don’t worry Suse users. I’ll come out with a list of “things I love” soon.
May 16th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Gabriel,
Man, you took the words right out of my mouth! I hadn’t tried another Linux distribution in 2 years, so I decided to give Suse 10.1 a try (Suse was my first love, many years ago)
The first thing I do after installing a new OS is check for security updates. I noticed that there is a small updater icon in the system tray. Clicking on this, it says, “There are no software updates available”. I think, “Hmmm…. I guess everything is updated and patched for security vulnerabilities.” But looking a little further, it appears that by default Suse doesn’t look online for updates, it only searches the install CD. Talk about a false sense of security!
Here are more of my “Suse Rants”. (Scott - Perhaps you can respond to our critiques on your blog?)
- How are new users supposed to know what “YAST” is, and how it is different from “Control Center”?
- How do I search for and install new, up-to-date applications? (Related to needing online software repositories by default)
In summary, my recommendations to Suse are to change the default installation to automatically check for software updates online, and to simplify the management tools. YAST was great when it was the only thing out there, but now it needs to be greatly simplified and consolidated. For an example of what I consider simple, look at Ubuntu 6.06 LTS when it is released in few weeks.
Since I like to end on a positive note, Suse 10.1 looks very, very, nice. With a few small (but important) changes, Suse could become my second favorite Linux distro.
Tristan Rhodes
May 17th, 2006 at 6:39 am
Than use apt on suse. Apt comes with suse and it is even easier than typing
apt-get update, an apt update is sufficient. The apt packages can be retrieved from:
http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/10.1-i386/RPMS.base/