[sle-beta] Beta 5, initial impressions

[Joe Doupnik]

     SLES 15 beta 5. My overall impression thus far is good, and the 
system works as an ESXi guest in my case.
     A few comments about it.
     A fresh installation of beta 5 would not boot: no O/S found. Some 
use of Recovery and Update menus to view and refresh disk partitioning 
and initrd brought this under control. I must have made a silly error 
somewhere in this familiar process. A guess is I defined a /boot 
partition, type EXT2 so there is no journal to be replayed, and not 
using the offered EFI choice. Root is XFS. Unless others encounter a 
similar problem this will remain as a local fluke.
     Retention of various standard network utilities (say netstat, 
telnet etc) is much appreciated. Yet there remain problems such as 
xinetd not installing completely and thus not being usable. What would 
significantly help is a document describing the changes/shifts of 
direction/replacements so that sysadmins could smoothly cope with the 
changes. Presently we are left stranded.  Such a doc could extrapolate 
from say SLES11 level to that now in SLES15.
     I appreciate the gradual reordering of material; that is good. 
However, in the process some common installation bits are becoming 
buried in the overall structure. Examples are setting the screen 
resolution and some menus now have their captions truncated and thus be 
nearly unusable, ntp being disabled after its usual initial setup, 
PackageKit refusing to get out of the way, nearly buried Cert Authority 
config in YaST, non-tracking of GUI keyboard language, and so forth. 
Thus, for the future I think a good idea would be to identify such 
common practice settings and make them be more visible rather than being 
relegated levels deep as now.
     It is a bit concerning to see the Apache web server identified as 
basically unsupported, and its YaST section gone. There must be a good 
reasons for this, yet it would be beneficial for us to have Apache 
return as a first class item rather than a DIY item.
     I am pleased to see the system brought to the Openssl v1.1 level 
across the board, and having the FIPS option.
     Lastly, I am impressed with how well SUSE is handling the current 
CPU chip security issues. That measured approach is valued.
     Thanks,
     Joe D.