From the course: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Essential Training

Intro to YaST - Linux Tutorial

From the course: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Essential Training

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Intro to YaST

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- [Instructor] The premise accepted by most Linux distributions is that administrators prefer working with the command line at all times. This comes from a further assumption that administrators want to put everything in batch files and scripts that will execute things for them over and over again. SUSE has taken a different approach, with a belief that administrators would prefer using modern GUI tools to make their job easier. In the past, the problem has been, GUI tools use configuration files of a proprietary format, and that when you change things with a GUI, it is not altering the underlying operating system in the way that it would be modified if you used the command line. SUSE is building these GUIs to work right alongside the command line utilities and their associated configuration files. To this end, SUSE has created YaST, which stands for Yet another Setting Up Tool, which is a GUI front-end to many of the system administrators tasks. We are now looking at YaST. It's one general control panel with various different aspects. If we scroll through and look at what we've got here, we've got things like date and time. Other things like configuring and setting up an FTP server. Furthermore, we have configuration for things like the firewall, or user and group management. The idea behind YaST is that it's simply a front-end GUI for the same utilities systems administrators have been using for quite some time. YaST itself is written in Perl, so that can be modified to an extent, by anybody that's proficient in Perl, and any of the configurations that you have in YaST, will be saved in its own configuration file. So YaST's own configuration file is in etc/sysconfig in a file called YaST2. So if we take a quick look at that, just to see what's in there, we can see things that configure just the YaST GUI itself. So you can customize that to any way you want. Let's also take a look in /var/log/YaST2/ in here, the file we want to look at is Y2log. This is a log for everything that is done by YaST. So if you wanna see the results of the changes that are made by you using the GUI, you should find them in this log file. The main thing to remember here is that SUSE takes a different approach to system administration. Tries to make a GUI available for everything, so that you don't have to work with the more complex command line.

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