Bug 1218545

Summary: YaST -> Network Services -> Remote Administration (VNC) help on minimal installs
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE Distribution Reporter: Bryan Gartner <bryan.gartner>
Component: PatternsAssignee: Lubos Kocman <lubos.kocman>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Normal    
Priority: P5 - None    
Version: Leap 15.5   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: 64bit   
OS: openSUSE Leap 15.5   
Whiteboard:
Found By: --- Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Bryan Gartner 2024-01-04 16:44:01 UTC 
After deploying just a "Server" pattern, then trying to utilize YaST -> Network Services -> Remote Administration (VNC), the display-manager.service will never start without errors. And this has happened in previous versions of Leap as well.

So wishing that YaST would help (for that service deployment), to also include installs of xdm and replacing busybox-sysvinit-tools -> sysvinit-tools plus xrdp. With those changes, it does work then work fine (even with YaST and/or restarting display-manager). Of course this could also be mentioned and included in the documentation https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-reference/cha-vnc.html

The reason I do such a minimal deployment (Server) instead of a desktop is to provide a GUI (aka VNC) for others to interact with things like KVM/Rancher/K8s/docker/AI/ML (besides just ssh -X interactions).
Comment 1 Stefan Hundhammer 2024-01-04 17:36:22 UTC 
Sorry, no: This is not a job for the installer.

Software patterns, just like packages, need to be self-contained: They need to work as designed no matter how they are installed, via YaST / Agama, a zypper command line or a central administration tool like SUSE Manager.

That leaves dependencies or pre/post-install scripts or both as solutions. That might not always be easy, but it is a requirement that it cannot rely on an external tool like YaST / Agama to fix such gaps as you mentioned.

I fully agree that your scenario should work without manual intervention, but it's not a task for YaST / Agama to take care of it. Not only would that kind of code constantly need to be changed for different versions (also consider all the update and migration scenarios!), it also blurs the line for responsibilities between the pattern maintainer and the YaST team.

We had that in the past where all kinds of crude hacks had to be implemented in YaST to overcome flaws in the design or implementation of packages. We got rid of that: It doesn't work, and if fails miserably when something needs to be done without that tool.

You need to be able to do it with a zypper command line, too. If that doesn't work, the pattern / package is broken and needs to be fixed.


For this concrete problem, the pattern might have a requirement for a pseudo-provides that other patterns bring, or, if they don't get installed, a (new?) package that takes care of the missing steps.