Finding things on my SuSE 6.4 distribution CDs is a nightmare. Today I wanted to install GNOME and also look at some of the KDE source code. I figured, no problem. Just start up the YAST (Yet Another Setup Tool), select a few packages, and go. Except “select a few packages” turns out to be much harder than it needs to be. I didn’t want all of the KDE sources, just the utilities, libraries, and base functionality. There must be 100 KDE source packages. The utilities were easy enough to find, and the base stuff was conveniently located at the head of the list. I had no idea that the libraries weren’t part of the base package. I must have spent an hour searching the descriptions of all of the KDE source packages.
GNOME, I thought, would be different. After all, there should be just one package that’ll install the base functionality, right? Wrong. Another hour. And I made the mistake of installing some GNOME utilities, one of which figured that it needed to change my sendmail.cf file, causing me no end of frustration when my SMTP server stopped working.
Yep. Linux (at least SuSE Linux) setup and configuration still has a ways to go.