some AutoYaST UI changes

in openSUSE 11.1 and SLES11, there are some changes in the AutoYaST UI. First of all, the tree on the left was dropped to be more YaST control center like and all summaries of one section are collected on one page now. That means you save at least one click when jumping between modules ;)
The usage of the UI has changed a bit by this, like some buttons were replaced by Combobox Widgets.
Thanx to Martin Schmidkunz for the suggestion on how the UI should look like from a usability point of view and thanx to Sven Schober (a student in my team) for implementing it.



Another important change has happened in the validation dialog which shows the name of the section in the AutoYaST profile that has failed the validation now.
With jing installed you were always able to see which part of the profile is broken but now even with only xmllint installed you can at least see wich section failed.
Thanx to Sven Schober again for implementing this.

EVMS support dropped in SLES11

I'm back from my vacation in france and while checking my TODOs, I read that EVMS support was dropped for SLES11. That means today I dropped EVMS support from AutoYaST as well. AutoYaST will no longer be able to deal with EVMS during cloning or installing in SLES11. For SLES10 and the service packs of SLES10 it's still supported.
If you want to read more about EVMS in SLES11, look here.

online update after autoinstallation

openSUSE 11.1 will allow you to run an online update at the end of the installation. All you have to do is to set the boolean value do_online_update in the software section to true. That makes only sense if an online update repository is available and so you should configure the suse_register part in the profile too. suse_register will add an online repository automatically. If the online update source has been added via add-on section in your profile, then you don't need to do the online update because autoyast has installed the latest packages during stage 1 already.
If a kernel update gets installed during that online update, a reboot at the end of stage 2 is triggered too.
Here is the official documentation.

Issues with the bnx2 network device driver

on SLES10 SP2 the bnx2 driver has the problem, that it takes ages (up to 60s) for it to raise up the network device. Until then, no network is available. That can disturb the automatic installation. First of all, if your installation source is on a network device, YaST can not connect that installation source. That issue was fixed for SP2 (see bugzilla).
Still there are problems when you have init-scripts with a <location> that requires network (like HTTP, FTP,...) because after configuring the network device by autoyast, it takes another 60 seconds to raise the device and the <location> is evaluated after the network configuration. As a workaround you have to add an inline post-script that waits for 60 seconds:

<scripts>
<post-scripts config:type="list">
  <script>
      <network_needed config:type="boolean">false</network_needed>
      <filename>wait.sh</filename>
      <interpreter>shell</interpreter>
      <source><![CDATA[
sleep 60
]]>
      </source>
    </script>
</post-scripts>
<init-scripts config:type="list">
    <script>
      <location>http://.....</location>
      ...
    </script>
</init-scripts>
</scripts>

that script will wait 60 seconds and then network should be available and the remote init-scripts can be fetched.

If you need network in your init-script too, then you have to wait again for 60 seconds or so in your init-script.

I know, that sucks but the driver is broken and the description above is just a workaround for a broken network device driver.

Proposallist with openSUSE 11.1

with openSUSE 11.1 you can configure the proposal screen that is shown when you set the confirm option to true or you pass y2confirm on the linuxrc commandline. So you can hide all proposal except for the language selection and the software selection for example.

  <general>
    <mode>
      <confirm config:type="boolean">true</confirm>
    </mode>
    ...
    <proposals config:type="list">
      <proposal>country_simple_proposal</proposal>
      <proposal>software_proposal</proposal>
    </proposals>
  </general>

post-packages broken in openSUSE 11.0

the <post-packages config:type="list"> section got broken on openSUSE 11.0.
The reason is a client that was deactivated because since the second stage was dropped from the manual installation, that client was not needed anymore - for the manual installation but AutoYaST has been overlooked and there it's still needed.
Fortuantely there are workarounds. You can install the packages via script (post-script with "network_needed=true should do the job or even an init-script) or you can change the control.xml file on the root of the installation source (that's not your autoyast XML profile. It's really a file called control.xml on the installation source of openSUSE 11.0).
Around line 1059 there is a line like this:
<name>rpmcopy_secondstage</name>
change that line to
<name>rpmcopy</name>

configure the running system

With the AutoYaST UI of 11.1 you can write the settings of the profile you are working on to the currently running system. Of course only second stage configuration can be written so partitioning for example can't be done.
You can write the config of each single module (like only the sysconfig module for example) with the new "write to system" button or ...
... you can apply the complete profile to the running system with the "Apply profile to this system" option in the file menu.

if you want to do that on command line instead of using the UI, you can use the ayast_setup client.