Talk:YaST

YAST2

I tried a suse10 livecd and YAST2 was amazing. I've never seen a central linux control panel GUI before. Rather than having access to no system features because I don't use the command line, YAST2 is a full GUI like the windows control panel. Now for the question.

Do other distros have anything comparable to YAST2? Or is Suse unique?

Yes, it exist an project YaST4Debian: http://yast4debian.alioth.debian.org/ --Muvon53 11:13, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Mandriva uses drakconf.--Hhielscher 03:38, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Added additional info about OpenSUSE 10.3 86.88.194.197 (talk) 10:35, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Maybe we should add a section - maybe in the external links - that lists distributions that use Yast. Oracle is using for their Oracle Unbreakable Linux project. Babba Lou (talk) 05:15, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

When did it become "Your Awesome Setup Tool"? It used to be "Yet Another Setup Tool". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.112.4.197 (talk) 02:19, 14 June 2008 (UTC)

non-free history

It would be nice to read a chapter about YaST's non-free history. 85.131.30.249 (talk) 13:22, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. The fact it started with a Domain-specific language (apparently called YCP) and moved to Ruby, and its nonfree history are notable for someone curious about its position in distro ecosystem history. —Hobart (talk) 19:14, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

why?

A chapter on why an aardvark is the logo would be as useful and much more interesting.

Why is most of Yast2 not even mentioned?

Yast is a pretty big collection of software components with a GTK3 or Qt5 GUI and TUI. Amount other things it does is:

• Software management
  • In general serves as a front end to Zypper (which is a pretty easy to use CLI package manager w/ reasonably good solving skills)
  • Repository configuration
  • Software selection, installation, updates, removal
  • Automatic patching
• User Management
  • PAM
  • LDAP
• Disk management
  • Partitioning
  • LVM, SAMBA, etc. share
• Security
  • Firewall
  • Audit
  • Hardening
  • AppArmor MAC (? is there an SELinux module now that it is included in repos?)
  • Certificate management
  • Etc.
• Hardware
  • Printing
  • Scanners
  • Very weak sound configuration (need to use other tools if you want sound to work with everything, esp. since is a mix of Pipewire, Phonon, PulseAudio, Jack, etc. etc.)
• Networking
  • Now is mostly deprecated since switch to NM, but I assume that some Yast2 GUI module is in the works to replace the deprecated one--kind of silly to not have one. The user-space application does require root privileges for some functions.
  • BIND
  • DNS
• Booting
• Internet servers
  • Web server (I think it does Apache httpd, don't know about others)
  • Email
• System configuration (big. "misc." system config tools)
• Really lame font management
• Missing things:
  • No WINE module (Q4WINE is OK, but again it sort of sucks to not have a package manager for Windows...oh, wait, that's right, that one of those things Windows sort of has these days, but I don't know if you can use Microsoft's store w/ WINE)
  • Python and Java environments--they do things a bit differently than how other packages are managed and I think it gets screwed up pretty easily. It would be great to not have to install Anaconda just to have a working Python data tools, and Python development platform (for novices who are just learning in particular) that doesn't run the risk of screwing up system software that would depend on same.
  • Build from GIT (so much is done these days this way, it only seems like a logical generic control under software management)
  • Display setup (it is
  • Delegation/control of user privileges (e.g. via sudo)
• Somethings which need serious work
  • Package manager drives users crazy, esp. Tumbleweed when it hangs because it cannot find a package that has been updated between the time the user selected it and the time they clicked to "accept" selections. (No user option to either skip, or refresh repo and install most recent change--it will just beep every 30s when it fails to download it again as the only default action is to try, try again)
  • Repos (not a Yast2 issue, but the package manager should do something about flagging) contain software where dependencies are not available in openSUSE repos!
  • Package manager has very primitive search/filter
    • Should be able to filter GUI tools based on your desktop environment e.g. "Hide GNOME components" "Hide GNOME software" "Hide GTK GUI software" "Show QT5 software w/o KF5 dependencies" "Hide GUI applications" "Hide non-GUI applications" or programming language e.g. "Show only Python 3.11 software and libraries" "Hide Python 2 software and libraries" "Show Java applications" "Show Java libraries" "Show JRE languages and libraries" "Only show software for Wayland" "Hide Wayland-only packages".
    • Need to alert users when they are selecting incompatible versions of libraries--super easy to do with KDE if you add some of the optional KDE repos and don't pay attention to where you are installing KDE apps from. Not sure why KDE so reliably prevents logging into a GUI if you have libraries from different repos w/ slightly different versions, but it really hates that.
  • Incomplete and outdated descriptions in package metadata
  • Font management is awful. It should not be hard to add/remove/inactivate fonts either system-wide or on an individual user basis; nor should it be hard to see which fonts cover specific character glyphs/Unicode ranges; and similarly it should be very easy to define which fonts are used for fallback for other fonts when a specific glyph cannot be located.
  • Database server setup/config (at least initial setup and user management for PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL, Firebird, Arangodb, 4Store, Mongo, and Cassandra since they are all in repos--not playing favorites, and if there are others, it would be grand to include them) since this is a common chore. While there are decent DB tools out there that let a DBA do this, you shouldn't have to spend an afternoon reading Stackexchange to get PostgreSQL setup for the first use!)
  • Package repos do not have a lot of common Apache software projects
    • e.g. Hadoop
  • Some software is installed as scripts downloaded as add-ons to KDE Plasma in a wide range of places. Some work, some do not. Be nice if openSUSE would have a repo of plug-ins for Dolphin/Konqueror, Plasma widgets, etc. which provided useful function and work. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:447:CD7E:7CF0:EF9E:BC4D:EACB:42AD (talk) 21:35, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

RPM based?

Package management is just one of the capabilities of YaST, not its primary function. Therefore, calling it "RPM based" in the opening sentence is misleading. Like presenting a Corvette as electricity based; it's so much more. How much more? YaST arranges its administration tools into categories, where one category admittedly is package management, others include hardware (e.g. printing, audio), system (e.g. partitioning, bootloader, runlevels), network connectivity, network services, security (e.g. firewall, users), virtualization. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.209.102.192 (talk) 23:43, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved.  Ronhjones  ^(Talk) 21:01, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

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Yet another Setup Tool → YaST — This page should be changed to YaST, which is the name of the tool. The meaning of the acronym is actually used instead. Spyhawk (talk) 20:32, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

• Support Appears to be a topic known almost exclusively by its abbreviation, per the naming conventions. Propaniac (talk) 20:36, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

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Translations

It might be worth mentioning that Yast2 is available in 72 (just counted them) different languages.

Platforms

Yast2 is available for RISC V (64bit), ARM, PowerPC, IBM Z-systems, x86, x86_64, and System 390.

Latest release version

The "latest release version", as mentioned on this article, seems to be increasing quite fast. FWIW, the version of the yast2 package currently included in openSUSE 15.2 Beta, which is not yet the "latest stable" release of the OS (release foreseen begin July) is 4.2.83-lp152.1.1 (where the part after the dash is a "build number" for this OS). Tumbleweed has no releases, it is a kind of "advance version of the next OS", and I don't know which YaST version is included with SUSE Linux Enterprise. — Tonymec (talk) 06:41, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

P.S. The label in the infobox says Latest stable release with a <ref> to a "github master" which is AFAICT the latest bleeding-edge development release. IMHO the "latest stable" release of that software is the one included in the latest stable release of openSUSE Linux, namely openSUSE Leap 15.1, which includes Yast 4.1.77 if all "stable updates" are taken into account. (The next stable release, Leap 15.2, is foreseen for 6 August 2020, a beta version is already available, and it will include some 4.2.xx version of Yast.). IMHO most of the "version push-ups" made by unregistered user 153.198.45.12, and maybe some others, are unjustified: I'm in favour of reverting them, but I don't want to start a revert war — and I'm ready to listen to any solid argumentation against what I'm saying above. (If I still don't get any answer in a "reasonable" time I'll take it as consent, though.) — Tonymec (talk) 02:14, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

Oops, I was mistaken by one month. openSUSE Linux version Leap 15.2 has been released today. It is the new "stable" release of openSUSE and includes YaST2 4.2.83. — Tonymec (talk) 14:33, 2 July 2020 (UTC)

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Keeping up is a never ending task

I don't know why people who work on software projects don't routinely assign someone to keep their Wikipedia pages up to date. But, openSUSE Leap 15.5 is going to be released soon, and Tumbleweed is updated daily, and, these days, is more-or-less stable (occasional regressions creep in, but for the most part things work fine). The current package, circa beginning of July 2023, is 4.6.2 for Tumbleweed (and I think for Leap 15.4/15.5) and 4.4.0 for Leap 15.3.

WebYaST

After searching at openSUSE, I get the impression that WebYaST has been discontinued starting with openSUSE 12.2. Can someone confirm? — Tonymec (talk) 02:12, 12 July 2020 (UTC)