Re: Redhat 6.1

[Joachim Wesner <Joachim Wesner frankfurt netsurf de>]

Michal Jaegermann wrote:
>> I would think that language imperfections in SuSE manuals are really
> a minor point and besides there are far from beeing a sole province
> of SuSE.
> 
> What personally bugs me the most in SuSE distros are three things:

>   - a way of maintaining most of a configuration information in one huge,
>     clunky and opaque blob; this means that if you want to change your
>     e-mail address, and if you are doing that in an "official way", then
>     all of sudden your web server, and TeX installation, get
>     reconfigured in not necessarily predictable manner (I am dead
>     serious here).  If you need to maintain a few different
>     configurations (think, for example, a laptop which moves) with
>     few subsets which change independently then the whole thing
>     exponentially explodes unless you throw away all that junk and
>     maintain things yourself - but then you are screwed on updates.
>     To make matters more "interesting" an odd piece of configuration,
>     like routing information, is all of sudden tucked in some remote
>     corner and later you scratch your head trying to figure out what
>     went wrong

Unfortunatelly, you are soooo right, even regarding SuSE on Intel


>   - yast is terrible in __maintaining__ your system and grown men
>     were reduced to tears trying to figure out how to fight it.


YEP, I'm now trying for days now to install 6.1/Intel the way I would
like it (really only a few changes required) and the supplied 2.2.5 SuSE
modified kernel crashes as soon as ipxd is activated. Works with
original 2.2.12, however. YET, after removing about 350 MB of
unnecessary junk and adding other more interesting packages from the CDs
(always checking and insuring YAST's dependencies) the whole system
started to behave erratically and finally crashed hard during CDROM
access - before I could save the final package list and rc.config
-(while doing some backup over the net in the background, I admit), on
hardware that ran 1.2.13 (pre-YAST) flawlessly for years. After that,
the system was unusable. I hate YAST, but, as you write, if you ignore
it, you have to start all over again the next (update) time !

(YET, up to now, I *always* did complete installs, as I don't trust the
whole updat process, as soon as you have a somewhat nontrivial
configuration, but I hoped to end with that in the future !!).


Joachim