openSUSE 11.1 Configuration Guide

[consused]

One of the best presented guides I have seen, if it works as scripted (not going to reinstall to check).

I strongly share the concern of swerdna about the large number of repositories, the OBS ones in particular. Having that many enabled can and will lead to trouble for users who are unfamiliar with what can potentially go wrong. Even if they are as stable you say.

For newbies, that may start them off with too much complexity, too early in the learning process, and risks sending them back to MS Windows (or whatever) with a poor reference for linux generally, when it goes wrong. I would recommend the "For the more Advanced User" type of warning after the four basic repos (2x distribution, packman, and update). It is certainly better for problem solving, in my experience. Thanks to that advice, given by oldcpu many times in the forum, I have enjoyed excellent system stability with openSUSE through 10.x, and now 11.1.

[oldcpu]

Originally Posted by consused

One of the best presented guides I have seen, if it works as scripted (not going to reinstall to check).

I strongly share the concern of swerdna about the large number of repositories, the OBS ones in particular. Having that many enabled can and will lead to trouble for users who are unfamiliar with what can potentially go wrong. Even if they are as stable you say.

For newbies, that may start them off with too much complexity, too early in the learning process, and risks sending them back to MS Windows (or whatever) with a poor reference for linux generally, when it goes wrong. I would recommend the "For the more Advanced User" type of warning after the four basic repos (2x distribution, packman, and update). It is certainly better for problem solving, in my experience. Thanks to that advice, given by oldcpu many times in the forum, I have enjoyed excellent system stability with openSUSE through 10.x, and now 11.1.

I agree with consused. An excellent guide. Many thanks.

I also share Swerdna's and consused concerns' about the large repository list. On over 2 dozen occasions on the forums, and at least a dozen occasions on the IRC chat channels, I helped users whose multimedia was messed up because they blindly selected both videolan and packman repositories.

I have also helped other users who have had problems because of applications downloaded from KDE:Community and KDE:Backports broke something application specific on their system (and typically such problems can be difficult to help the user, as typically the user who has such problems does not have a clue as to what they did).

My recommendation is you qualify the list further, and put all repos in italics except for OSS, Non-OSS, Update and Packman. Now while openOffice and Mozilla are relatively harmless as repos, they are not completely so. I know of a case some years back where cutting edge openOffice rpms from the repos you quote seriously broke OpenOffice for a number of users. And I know of a case where the Mozilla repos had an rpm that broke things.

Hence I believe that recommending to users "to be sure to select the following", where it is known such repos will cause problems, will mean users have problems as a result of following the guidance there ... and it will mean additional/extra support and time required from those of us providing support, to try and unwind the problems that have been created.

BUT to put that in perspective, in the overall scheme of what your guide provides, its small. So I want to thankyou for a guide with a lot of neat and useful information.

[Guymer]

Yes, I too used to be one of those users who blindly selected the VideoLAN and Packman repositories and then ran into problems. Now I've learnt about it and I have reflected this in my guide by telling the reader to un-select VideoLAN once they've download libdvdcss and before they install any other packages.

I see your points regarding the openSUSE Build Service and since I've recieved some many comments about them on this thread it is definitly something which I am re-considering. Thanks.

Thank you for the thank you,

[FeatherMonkey]

Whilst you've added the implications of doing it adding yourself to group root and sudo with no passwd is not recommended. As this tut is aimed at new users personally I think this should be removed..

root group - openSUSE Forums

Edit
OK I missed no passwd set to no, still. Though I wonder how many new users will go Ohh and change to yes. As for root group I'm still unsure of the implications. I guess if there is an app that allows group root to do an action it can still have bad consequences. I'm not sure of your reasonings for it.

[Guymer]

My fairly weak answer is that I find it easier with respect to the mounted file system. Perhaps I'll change it...

[FeatherMonkey]

Perhaps change it to do a specific sudo i.e sudo mount then new users can investigate on there own.

Unless I'm mistaken I thought disk was the better group but isn't something I've really played with.

Though from the looks of things the correct way would be change Permissions policies for hal as this wiki...

HAL - ArchWiki As it is Arch specific(Sorry Suse wiki isn't on par) I think where they have the storage group you would need the disk group.

[Guymer]

Thanks for the link, I have removed the recommendation of adding a user to root, cheers!