Converting to Ubuntu

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009, Yu Meng Chong wrote:
>
>----- "Collins Richey" <crichey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Joel Hammer<joel at hammershome.com>
>> wrote:
>> > I shudder to think some idiot might try to get rid of old fashioned
>> text configuration files
>> > someday.
>> 
>> Some idiot did years ago. It's called SuSE.

>Hey, what do you mean by that? ;) I use Yast2, but I still edit text
>configuration files!

At one time SuSE's yast configuration depended on a single mongo
configuration file, and it would overwrite manual changes in the
real configuration files.  By the time we moved to SuSE from
Caldera (SuSE 7.something maybe), the yast configuration had
eliminated the mongo file and worked with the normal system files.

>I think a lot of people get the impression that Yast2 is another attempt at
>"dumbing down" Linux. But Suse is aimed at a different audience. For
>businesses, there needs to be a standardized method for doing stuff and
>Yast2 provides that by restricting the number of choices available to a
>user/sysadmin. An example is configuring DHCP and Dynamic DNS. You could
>edit the configuration files by hand, but you could get very different
>configurations depending on the proficiency of the sysadmin. With Yast2,
>you can only configure it a few ways, so documentation and troubleshooting
>are easier.

>Of course some people will say that I am plugging Suse because I am a
>Novell reseller -- and that's partly true! But, for me, it is really easier
>to sell a SuSE solution than, say, a CentOS/RH solution because you know
>that there are a finite and very limited number of ways that the user can
>screw up. The tougher stuff, like Samba or Apache configuration, I do by
>hand rather than use Yast2, but that is also because I know that the
>client's sysadmin probably won't want to get his/her hands dirty with that.

We moved from SuSE Enterprise Linux to CentOS a couple of years
ago mostly because we never got any useful support from Novell
even though we were ``Partners''.  About the only thing we use of
the distribution's admin tools are for network and display
configuration, handling pretty much everything else with packages
from the OpenPKG portable package management system.  I have had
fewer problems with system-config-network than ``yast2 lan'', but
that may be just me.  Rarely do our clients ever do much admin
configuration work as that's what they pay us to do.

We generally do not use Linux systems for desktop applications,
and most of our systems boot in init state 3 so graphical admin
tools are not important (they work fine with ssh X11 forwarding
which is all I care about).

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186  Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792

Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.
    Will Rogers