openSUSE 10.3 1-click install
August 21st, 2007 by heathenxHere’s an interesting post on the 1-click install feature that will be implemented in the new openSUSE 10.3 distro.
New users to openSUSE often dislike the package management system. It wasn’t always like that but ever since Novell bought SUSE they have been trying to get a handle on better package management. I remember when I moved from Red Hat to SUSE a few years ago the first thing that I did was figure out how to get apt/synaptic installed. While the developers have worked on a new package management system (zypper), most users have grown accustomed to using the Smart package manager as an apt replacement. Honestly, Smart is all I ever use. I rarely use Yast or zypper or rug or zen or whatever we have available. Quite frankly, I am a little confused by all of them. Yast is a no-brainer but the others aren’t useful to me. For me Smart just works and it works just like apt and that’s what I want. I want to be able to “sudo smart install package_name” (as opposed to “sudo apt-get install package_name”) and know that it installed with all dependencies needed.
Anyway, the 1-click install looks like it will be quite handy. Will it stop me from using Smart when 10.3 is finally released? We’ll see…
Btw, 1-click install reminds me of klik.
August 27th, 2007 at 11:52 am
The only thing this has in common with klik is the use of special:// links. However, while klik is designed to run on all distributions independently of the package manager, this is deeply tied into the package manager.
Let’s look at Joe who wants to run appfoo:
* With klik, Joe gets appfoo. He does not need root privileges to get and run it, and nothing in the base system is changed (i.e., no new repositories are installed, no existing packages are forcibly upgraded, no libraries are instaleld system-wide). The worst thing that can happen to Joe is that appfoo will refuse to run on his machine.
* With openSUSE’s 1-click install, Joe is asked to use his root password, to accept a strangely-named repository as a system-wide package source, to upgrade existsing packages and libs on his system, and to get things from that unknown repository into his base systems that can seriously mess up not only appfoo, but the entire machine. In the worst case, he will end up with package conflicts that can render his setup unusable (at least for average Joe).
Let’s look at Mary who has a 2-distro dual setup:
* With klik, she gets appfoo once and runs it on both distros.
* With openSUSE’s 1-click install, she cannot use apfoo on, say, Ubuntu.
So the two approaches are really not that similar at all, despite the surface. That’s not to make any judgement, they just do entirely different things.
August 27th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
@probono
I understand the differences between klik and rpm. What I meant when I wrote that 1-click install reminds me of klik is the web site distribution system. ..where one sees a package and just clicks on it to install or run. I should have a clarified.