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 - example.local, for example. It took days for us to find out that OpenSUSE 11 - for some reason - doesn't resolve ANY .local domains over DNS unless you EXPLICITLY tell it to. So, dig foobar.example.local will resolve, but dig foobar 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…