YaST to Become Open Source 478
Space_Soldier writes "According to News.com, YaST is going open source: 'For years, SUSE has considered its YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) software for installing, configuring and managing Linux an advantage over its competitors and forbade them from incorporating it into the products they sold. But with the new plan, to be announced Monday at Novell's Brainshare conference, the company will release YAST under the GPL, sources familiar with the plan said.'" Several years ago, when I first used YaST, I found it to be superior to the rest of the all-in-one administation tools around at the time. It was generally regarded as a great program, save for the licensing. Today, that's no longer a concern.
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:5, Informative)
Yep. [redhat.com]
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:3, Informative)
However, it's an awesome tool. I love their installer and partitioner with the option of automatic NTFS partition resizing and the creation of a dual boot system if it finds Windows on the drive. Superb!
Re:I love open source, BUT (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I dunno what other OS is using it as it's installer, but it's not debian. Debian's new installer's self rolled, text only, very basic stuff. Anaconda has, however, been ported to install Debian by Progeny [progeny.com]. Pretty neat, but I don't see it eever taking precidence to the Debian Installer.
And I do agree with you that it probably won't take away any market share. If anything, it sets up SuSE as running against RedHat, which should be a very interesting battle. And we are the ones to benefit.
YaST is not one of those (Score:4, Informative)
Re:YaST over SSH (Score:5, Informative)
Re:YaST support for console (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In Sun Java Desktop too (Score:1, Informative)
That's how.
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:5, Informative)
Overall I think SuSE has struck a very good balance between gui tools, and config files.
Re:In Sun Java Desktop too (Score:2, Informative)
Re:YaST support for console (Score:5, Informative)
$ rpm -qa | grep curse
ncurses-5.3-110
yast2-ncurses-2.8.20-3
There is a ncurses version and best of all you can find all the options and menus in the same places as you would with the X version - very consistent. It's funny I replied [slashdot.org] to another poster earlier today who was complaining about YaST being "closed source". This is great news because hopefully now we can put this "non-gpl" argument behind us and support [suse.com] Novell & SUSE with our wallets on May 6th when SUSE 9.1 becomes available. Or pre-order it now - I don't know from where though. I do remember seeing a link somewhere during a Google search.
Re:Compare to redhat-config-* (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Open Source Oscar of the year goes to Novell (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think it's that easy: http://opengroupware.org/en/users/faq/index.html [opengroupware.org]
How does OGo compare to SuSE OpenExchange?
A: SuSE OpenExchange is actually two things: an OpenSource messaging server based on Cyrus and OpenLDAP and a closed source, proprietary web groupware server (ComFire).
OGo is very similiar to the groupware server part and indeed you can install OGo as the groupware component on an OpenExchange server to save the ComFire license costs and use a solution wholly composed of OpenSource software.
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:2, Informative)
Which is why we should move to something like XML based configuration files. Lets gui tool configurators and manual tweakers coexist happily.
Re:SaX (Score:4, Informative)
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, you can do that in other distros as well, but YaST sets it up for you by default.
Re:YAST vs urpmi (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Good work Novell (Score:3, Informative)
Re:restarting yast development (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps Novell will make ISO's available. (Score:5, Informative)
Linux distributions (Score:1, Informative)
But GPL'ng YaST is of course good news.
This is actually why I use Linux over Windows; lot of more choices :)
Re:YAST vs urpmi (Score:3, Informative)
Another requirement is that you actually study what it does to determine if that is useful to you.
Up to now you apparently did not do that.
YaST does not, like some older Unix administration programs, take over all administration from you and prohibit your own changes.
For example, you can add users with commandline tools like useradd or by editing the 4 relevant files, and YaST will have no problem with that.
To switch off yast (SuSEconfig in fact) (Score:5, Informative)
You'll notice this:
"## Path: System/SuSEconfig
## Description:
## Type: yesno
## Default: yes
#
# Some people don't want SuSEconfig to modify the system. With this
# entry you can disable SuSEconfig completely.
# Please don't contact our support if you have trouble configuring your
# system after having disabled SuSEconfig. (yes/no)
#
ENABLE_SUSECONFIG="yes""
Set that to no then, saves the trouble in switching over to a completely different distro. Whilst you're at it, check the other files in that directory.
Re:Finally... (Score:3, Informative)
That's one of the things I like about YaST, I can SSH in and run it to install packages or configure without having to think.
Wrong headline (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Perhaps Novell will make ISO's available. (Score:3, Informative)
Why? I don't see how the (old) Yast license would have had any influence on that matter. Certainly not for SuSE, but also others could distribute Yast freely as long as no money is involved.
Re:YaST over SSH (Score:2, Informative)
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:YasT may be good but (Score:2, Informative)
The architecture supporting YaST is (very simplified*) like this:
"whatever" is things like apache, gdm2, tetex and loads of other stuff. Sometimes all of them gets run, but most will not actually do anything if nothing has changed. (md5 checksums ar kept for lots of things).
Several of the files under /etc/sysconfig have variables to turn off parts of the SuSEconfig machinery, meaning that the actual config files of the apps will not be changed. That way you can make your own changes stick, while still using YaST for most things.
You can add your own custom stuff to the /etc/sysconfig/* files, and add calls to custom stuff in the /sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.* scritps. Also when I've changed my /etc/sendmail.cf without turning off YaST processing of sendmail, SuSEconfig writes its version in a different file, allowing me to do a diff and maybe incorporate what I like in the actual sendmail.cf. These kinds of things will usually be disabled by an upgrade though, so it's best to keep custom stuff in separate files and just insert a "source" command in the stuff that belongs to YaST.
* "very simplified" means e.g that some things under /etc/init.d read the /etc/sysconfig/* stuff directly, YaST may stop/restart a service that is about to have its config files changed, and that there are lots of nooks and crannies in YaST I haven't stumbled upon.
Re:registry - one advantage... permission (Score:2, Informative)
NT did not bother too much about locking down the registry though the facilities were there. Sure, there were whole trees that were off-limits to mere mortals but they could have done a much better job. I hear that Windows XP does a decent job in this department.
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:2, Informative)
You are missing the point. Storage space is not the only problems associated with the size. How long does it take to read the file?
Re:YaST - great for newbs but... (Score:2, Informative)
When you need manual config, most of config files that YaST use have ability to include other files, so you deal with your own modifications in another file and no need to change ones that YaST created.
Nowdays YaST is very usefull so I'm switching most configs to use them from YaST because it saves me lot of time when dealing with lot of machines.
Re:registry - one advantage... permission (Score:1, Informative)
All the permissions you need.
Future! (Score:4, Informative)
YaST is nice and makes a great foundation for configuration. Are we talking YaST and/or YaST2? But SaX2, the X11 configuration tool, has been exceptional in my experience.
Anyone can configure a Linux machine these days, but few can get the X11 configuration working correctly.
If linux is truely aiming for the Desktop, wouldn't it make sense to have X11 configuration realiable and easy?
The real test now is coming into the configuration of peripheral devices more than the core OS and applications. Email and Web is not hard to do if you pay some attention to what you are doing.
But getting USB, FireWire, printers, sound, video all working cleanly and consistently will be the real test. Many distributions do this well to different degrees of success, but as always you have to check your hardware carefully before you buy it. This peripheral support is still a factor holding back the adoption of Linux
But consistent with the problem of obtaining a Desktop Linux is the problem with Multimedia. Multimedia support under free sucks really bad. SuSE ships with the lamest install of xine/mplayer I've ever experienced. And it's not just SuSE or Debian. It's the multimedia libraries and all the Intellectual Property bullshit. There's no innovation here folks, just territorial land grabbing.
Maybe with the EU having the balls to make a judgement against Microsoft and the chance of them sticking with it in the vote today, there's a chance that some day we'll be able to watch DVD's on our Linux computers without the need to hide in closets.
I think the release of YaST means this:
YaST2 and the entire Linux community has developed to such a point that YaST no longer holds a leading edge against the competition to the extent that it used to. As such it would be a better investment if YaST was more freely available to evolve according to the OS environment as we (SuSE/Novell) concentrated our efforts on other tools that still provide a leading edge over the competition (YaST3?, SaX2..)
This isn't to say in any way that YaST isn't still a valuable tool. But it might be a matter of, "We have a pretty good tool, lets give it back to the community.... Now that's done we can gather around another project more intensively."
Like Anaconda.
I wonder what Debian or Gentoo has to say... They need some help with this stuff, especially Gentoo.
Re:Future! (Score:3, Informative)
YaST (ver 1) is obsolete and no longer used. YaST2 is the "only" YaST that exists today (save those run fairly old versions of SuSE). If in a shell, when "yast" is called it is merely a symlink to
Cheers
Re:Good work Novell (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know where you got this from. SuSe's market share and profit margin have been increasingly steadily. They've never been in decline, and their sales numbers show that sometime in the next few years they have the potential to surpass Redhat.
Probably due to the fact that YAST makes it easy even for the clueless to install Linux.
Max