openSUSE 11.3… some of the changes are for the worse.

…actually, one change only, as far as I’ve discovered.

The openSUSE guys decided to drop SCPM from 11.3.

“Instead” there is network manager.

Whoever made that decision has no idea at all about what scpm is, and what you can do with it…

To make it short, NetworkManager does exactly that… it manages network connections, after the user has logged in.

SCPM stands for “System Configuration Profile Manager”… and it does exactly that… it manages system profiles… at boot time. You pick the profile you want right at the grub screen, and based on which of your profiles you choose the system replaces configuration files and runlevels and starts daemons or not.

As an example:

With Network Manager I can set up different configurations for my wireless network card.

With SCPM I can set up different configurations for my whole system… as in “in this configuration start the network card with dhcp, and start NIS, and start the automounter with NIS maps, and the time server is that, and the proxy is this, and the local hostname is whatever, and Oh i want runlevel 5 with kdm4 with that theme and this xorg.conf with 1680×1050 with the nvidia driver” versus “in that configuration, start the network so that the user can configure it with network manager. No NIS, no Automounter, runlevel 5 with a different theme because its the internal display at 1280×800, and automatically log in that user” versus “in this configuration, no network config at all, not even network manager, and text mode (runlevel 3).”

Or in short… replacing SCPM with NetworkManager is like replacing a whole kitchen with all appliances with one single spoon.

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