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Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10: Page 2 of 5

YaST Eases Setup

If you can install Windows, you can install SLES 10. Linux first-timers will find only a few unfamiliar tasks, such as configuring swap space and having to choose between file systems such as ReiserFS and ext3. In most cases, using the default values is enough. But if you want to change the defaults--say, to tweak performance based on the types and sizes of files a machine serves--help is available during installation. Novell also made sure SLES 10 integrates well with Windows; the server can be set up to authenticate against Microsoft Active Directory (and OpenLDAP and eDirectory), and it supports Samba file shares.

We encountered only two minor disappointments during setup. First, the installer took nearly two minutes to boot and presented an empty blue screen rather than an indication of what was loading. Second, after the installer found a conflict between packages selected (a plus), the error message was longer than the window in which it appeared.

As with earlier SLES versions, YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) is SUSE's system administration tool, and it has no Red Hat equivalent. YaST's behavior is similar to Microsoft's Control Panel and the Microsoft Management Console combined: a graphical tool with many administration tools, such as Novell's ZENWorks (sold separately), that can be plugged into it. There's also a command-line version of YaST, an Ncurses-based app that has all of the same categories and tools as the GUI version, though not all of the same options for each tool.