I've run a lot of linux and unix versions over the years.. last year I took a liking to SuSE, it has a lot of bells and whistles. My first real experience with it was 7.3, very impressive. So I ordered 2 copies of 7.3 pro (~$140). Then 8.0 came out ..a bit after that I ordered 2 copies of that(another ~$140). More recently 8.1 came out, this time I only got 1 copy(~$66). (Originally I bought 2 copies so my sister would have a copy of the manuals for her system)
I don't mind paying, its a fancy distro, but I find it difficult to understand why such basic, important things slip past their QA teams. When 8.0 came out they had a bug where if you launched YOU(YaST Online update, their auto update tool) when logged in as root it would fail to verify gpg signatures forcing you to click a dialog box maybe 50 times(no way to abort mid-update, I tried once by killing the process, which caused the online update tool to immediately crash when launched every time after that,ended up having to reinstall the whole box, all attempts to purge and reinstall the YaST2 subsystem failed to resolve the issue and the box was only 2 hours old so it wasn't a big loss). But if you logged in as a normal user and loaded it(which it then prompted for the root password) it worked fine. Ok..what a pain, I figure it will be fixed in the next rev.. And it was, but in the process they introduced a new "bug" into YOU, it uses wget to download stuff apparently, and they failed to configure wget to use passive ftp, so any attempts to download fail(if your behind some form of NAT). I didn't know at the time, so I configured SuSE to use a proxy using their YaST2 tool, but I guess that setting doesn't affect YOU since wget's config wasn't changed. Only later did I see on their support page that they forgot to turn on passive ftp. When running YOU it just spits back a generic message saying basically 'error, try another mirror'. With all the bells and whistles I would of hoped this very very important application would work nearly flawless(infact it did, in it's first incarnation!). dissapointing. While SuSE has neat stuff like built in RAID/LVM support in the installer, I think having a working update tool is more important. Especially if this tool is designed from the ground up by SuSE, it's not some port of apt-get from some unsupported 3rd party[1], or some other tool, SuSE made it, why doesn't it work!(out of the box) and why they don't default to using HTTP vs FTP I'm not sure(their list of update servers doesn't list a single HTTP server). And why their proxy config doesn't change wget..*sigh* Also their mirror system is real shitty. Recently I installed SuSE 8.0 on about 6 differnet systems, when running YOU I had to connect to usually 2 or 3 different mirrors, since all of them were missing at least 1 package, and there was 1 package(forget which) which wasn't on ANY of the mirrors even the main SuSE site. If they aren't gonna provide the package, yank it so the update tool doesn't try to look for it! I still like SuSE, but I don't see it replacing any of my debian systems. And it would be nice if I didn't have to buy a CD to upgrade minor revisions(should be provided via YOU but I think YOU is not robust enough to handle such an upgrade). nate [1] I had tried apt-get which was ported to SuSE back about 7-8 months ago? on SuSE 8, it downloaded a buncha stuff then spit out an obscure error which I was unable to resolve(and it refused to continue). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]