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17/09/13

Chapter 1. Intro

Chapter 1. Intro Preface

Chapter 1. Intro
The most important thing reads: [DON'T PANIC!] Administering a Linux system at the low est level is sometimes not an easy task. If it should be done manually, it requires a very experienced and know ledgeable person, w illing to brow se and edit very many configuration files. As a result there have been many efforts to create intelligent tools that provide rather automatic means to accomplish this challenging and (at the same time) tedious task. One of these tools is Y a S T , the SUSE Linux installer. Being the result of a rather long period of development, it is by now a very large and capable system, w ell suited to install and administer a SUSE Linux system. While the internal functionality of Y a S Tis quite multifaceted and therefore not exactly easy to understand, it should not be kept as a secret. Rather the w orld shall be encouraged to make use of the mechanisms Y a S Tcan provide. This goal can be achieved because Y a S Tis not a closed monolithic system but has a high degree of modularity. In fact it consists largely of modules that could as w ell be created by people not related to Y a S Tdevelopment. For example hardw are vendors could provide a Y a S Tmodule for customizing specific system settings related to their particular piece of hardw are. From the user's point of view this w ould be much more comfortable than editing configuration files by hand. Of course this can't be done w ithout some know ledge of the Y a S Tinternal functionality. So this document tries to lighten things up by advancing from the unsubtle connections in the beginning to more and more detailed explanations tow ards the end. How ever, describing the particularities of this matter in full detail w ould easily fill several heavy books w hich in turn w ould contradict the goal of introductory simplification. Furthermore some of these details are subject to moderate change service, w hich w ould render static documentation like this one outdated rather quickly. To alleviate these problems, this text very often refers to the official Y a S Tdevelopers documentation that can be found in / u s r / s h a r e / d o c / p a c k a g e s / y a s t 2 *(especially tow ards the end). Aside from the references to be found in the follow ing text, this location provides very valuable information regarding the w hole Y a S Tenvironment. To have access to these files the follow ing packages must be installed: yast2-devel yast2-core-devel liby2util-devel yast2-packagemanager-devel

Preface

Chapter 2. What's Inside

doc.opensuse.org/projects/YaST/openSUSE11.3/tdg/id_preface_intro.html

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