[Techtalk] suse

[EevaJärvinen]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 06:54:52PM -0500, Pamela Talene Hale wrote:
>
> My question is this: Have you ever used Suse?  Are there pitfalls to

I'm using it right now, on a ThinkPad, at work (quiet day, most of the
people are on vacation).

> it that I should know about?  Is it work another 12 hours of my time
> to continue pursuing the debian angle instead of just going with
> Suse?  What about updates and upgrades?  Suse is rmp-based.  Does it
> have the same problems as Red Hat when it comes time to upgrade to
> the next distribution (i.e., you have to reinstall everything
> because the upgrade just breaks things?)  I really hate wasting my

I, as a rule, put my /home in a separate partition, because I don't
trust distro updates.  They may have gotten better, but I prefer a
clean install.  I'll have to reconfigure, of course, and that can be a
pain, but I don't upgrade at every new release.  I'm running 8.2 at
the moment, and the next upgrade will probably be to 9.1 (I want Gnome
2.4+Linux 2.6.x in it).  

Also, reconfiguring is sometimes a much better option, because that
way you get all the newest bells and whistles, and sometimes even an
easier and more manageable configuration.  But I wouldn't reinstall a,
say, big server, nor upgrade it lightly.

SuSE's oddities are perhaps more in the configuration tools; usually
it's easiest to use YaST, but sometimes (rarely, I admit) YaST can't
do what I want to do, so I have to hack the configuration files.
They're not exactly like they were in BSD 4.3 or SysV (the systems I
cut my teeth on), but usually the files are well commented in the
sense that they tell you where to put your configuration stuff so YaST
won't delete or choke on it.

IMO, rpm is just a package manager.  I don't normally install software
with it, but use YaST instead.  YaST handles that dependency stuff +
Online update gets+installs the security patches once a day.  If SuSE
has the packages you want, it'll probably work well.



Eeva

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