OpenSuse 11.0 Issues

After about 4 days of using OpenSUSE 11.0, I'm not overly impressed with it in comparison to RedHat Enterprise 3/4/5, CentOS 5, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.x (other distro's I've used). OpenSUSE has some annoying habits and default/unusual configurations…

1. Home Key when using PuTTy in Windows… By default, in /etc/inputrc on lines 136 & 136, the Home key is configured to do something entirely different to the normal "beggining of line" action which every other distro does. Good old Google to the rescue - all questions have been asked before. It seems this 'feature' has been present for a while! Simply remark out lines 135-136 so it looks like this.

   #
   # Home and End
   #
   $if term=xterm
   #
   # Normal keypad and cursor of xterm
   #
   #"\e[1~":       history-search-backward
   #"\e[4~":       set-mark

2. DNS Issues. The server is joined to a domain - <em>example.local</em>, for example. It took days for us to find out that OpenSUSE 11 - for some reason - doesn't resolve ANY <em>.local</em> domains over DNS unless you EXPLICITLY tell it to. So, <em>dig foobar.example.local</em> will resolve, but <em>dig foobar</em> will not resolve (will return SERVFAIL). This issue has many knock on effects.

   • It makes it VERY hard to join the box to a domain as it refuses to find the server once the domain has been suffixed

   • As a a webserver, if any pages try to curl or simple loads a script from themselves (eg, Drupal's cron.php), then you have to define the website's name in /etc/hosts otherwise the server cannot "see" itself.

   • SSH logins take about 10 seconds while the server tries to reverse lookup the machine name on the local network. Again - the "sollution" is to define your client name in /etc/hosts.

3. No yum or apt-get. SUSE uses Yast. Unless I'm doing something very wrong (which is likely) then Yast is so much more overcomplicated than it needs to be. I cant simply type "yum install httpd" or "apt-get install apache2"… oh no… I have to load Yast and then use the keyboard to scroll through all the awkward interfaces using a combination of arrow keys and tabs.

Oh the rage…