SuSE 6.0

[Jerry Feldman {75562}]

"Anthony J. Gabrielson" wrote:
> 
> Hello,
>         Did you go through yast?  Yast has a selection cofiguration file.
> You can go through and manually change settings.  there were a few
> annonances that I was ablt to make go away through that file.  What
> happened w\ sax?
I used YaST and I edited rc.config manually. 
SaX did not list my Monitor (eg. Digital 17in), and I did not have the
Hsync/Vsync clock rates handy. I guessed at a close monitor, but SaX issued
a message, please Wait, and I waited...
I am very comfortable with XF86Setup, so I went to that. I may try SaX
again, because it does appear to be a very good utility.

WRT: Network.
YaST itself is very limited as to what it configures, such a dhcp client Yes
or No, and it does not directly support multiple ethernet cards. You can
edit the configuration through YaST, but I found that emacs and vi are
better. There are several variables.
One specifies the number of interfaces, and is a list whose contensts are:
"_0 _1 _2 _3" for 4 NICs. 
Then there is NETDEV_0 which specifies the first device interface, eg.
"eth0", NETDEV_1="eth1", ....
There is another series which specifies the ifconfig settings, forget the
variable name, but something like:
SYSCFG_0="netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255 192.168.0.1 up"

The problem I see is if I set up the variables with eth1 as NETDEV_0, I get
messages that the interfaces are not recognized. If I set them up in order,
NETDEV_0="eth0", then the dhclient startup script grabs that interface
becauae $NETDEV_0 is hard coded into the script. As I mentioned, I was able
to bring up both interfaces correctly when I did it by hand, so the problem
is either a bug in the scripts of something wrong with the way I was setting
up the rc.config. I would prefer to use the scripts as supplied by SuSE, but
I am not adverse to modifying the scripts. I don't want to swap the cards,
because that means I nedd to reconfigure Windoz, with the required 36
reboots associated with changing minutiae. One of the reasons I am going
though this exercise in the first place is both professional curiosity as
well as knowing the product. 

IMHO: I think that SuSE rates along with Debian as being a complete
distribution along with a thorough package manager with dependency checking.
Red Hat is easier to install and manage, but lacks some of the suff I take
for granted. YaST is a very good installation tool, not as straightforward
as Red Hat's, but I think their system admin tool is excelent. 

One complaint I have is the location of the startup (inittab) scripts:

Red Hat has them in /etc/rc.d/init.d with the symlinks in /etc/rc.d/rcx ...
Debian has them in /etc/init.d with the symlinks in /etc/rc1.d, rc2.d...
SuSE has them in /sbin/init.d with the symlinks in /sbin/rc1.d, rc2.d...

This is no problem for a home desktop system with a good system admin
interface, but does cause a problem when one works with multiple systems.
But, Unix systems have always had their differences. 

The bottom line is that my SuSE system is up and running without any real
hassle other than the network stuff. I have not had time to get onto the
SuSE site or to read their docs, so they might already have a solution. 

I also have not configured my printer, but I don't see that as a problem
yet.
-- 
Jerry Feldman (HP On-Site Consultant) http://gbrweb.msd.ray.com/~gzf/
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