September 24, 2005 Archives

24.09.2005 00:20

SuSe and YAsT

YAsT is SuSe's own GUI admin tool. My constant rant is there isnt a GUI admin tool on eash distro, therefore forcing users (new users) to learn the command line for simple tasks. Only Vector, Mandriva and SuSe has a centralised GUI Admin tool thats worth anything. I have had experience with both Vectors VASM and Mandriva MCC and its hard to beat the MCC. I had the chance to do some extensive work with YAsT in the last few days and I must say I am impressed. I thought nothing could compare to MCC but I was wrong. Although YAsT doesnt beat MCC it has advantages in some areas that MCC doesnt and visa versa. I can see a PyGTK version of VASM having all that YAsT and MCC have thats strong ;) That all being said, but point for this post was to mention a valuable lesson I learnt using the Online Software Installation facet of YAsT. When you add a source it doesnt actually download the software list until you choose to search for some software with the new sources in place. Coming from an MCC background, when you add a new source it retrieves the meta data, software list etc when you add it, not later when you go to search and install new software. So when I was selecting to search YAsT took awhile and I had thought it had hung and Xkilled it. Went again and it was up much faster, as expected. Little did I know I was killing the meta data dowanload and thus trying to install software with dependacies fullfilled failed. The downloading of the much needed meta data on the source wasn't happening and thus everything was borked. What makes it hard is that YAsT says give it a few moments, which I did, who was to know its definition of a moment. So kids, allow the YAsT to download new sources data when access the search function and you will have a much nicer night of package updating then I did when it took me until past midnight to figure this out. -----

Posted by DaveQB | Permanent Link | Categories: IT