I am surprised I cannot find any Pardus specific information on this but here goes.
I have had a problem with Pardus since the first time I've tried it but I have let it go until now. I have to admit for a home user it's not that big of a deal but when using on a medium to large size network this is a big problem.
I'd also like to say that I LOVE pardus 2009.1! It is by far the most USABLE Linux I have ever seen. It seems to have excellent hardware support and probably the best feature is the custom network-manager which is by far the best I have ever seen especially when managing multiple wireless profiles. Even the package management is fantastic and I think that pisi plus the new mudur initialization system help make Pardus much more stable than any other Linux desktop I have ever used.
Anyways I'll get to it. I cannot disable the Avahi service! The reason why I need to disable it is crucial. As per the FAQ:
http://avahi.org/wiki/Avah4users#FAQ on the avahi website: I installed Avahi and now I cannot resolve hosts from my unicast DNS zone .local!
And it specifically says: mDNS/DNS-SD is inherently incompatible with unicast DNS zones .local. We strongly recommend not to use Avahi or nss-mdns in such a network setup.
It took me quite a bit of troubleshooting just to figure out that the problem was caused by the avahi service but as soon as I stop avahi (service avahi stop) the problem goes away.
What happens is if I leave the avahi service running, then I am unable to resolve hostnames that belong within a dns naming space that ends in .local. I also am unable to browse such networks using the smb browser built-in to KDE 4.
Now of course I have tried to disable the service to no avail. If I simply run "service avahi off" the system reports that the service will no longer start at boot, but it still starts at boot. Also I have verified that when I turn the service off it actually adds itself to /etc/mudur/services/disabled but it still starts automatically.
I am beginning to see that pardus maintains itself very differently than your average linux distro and it seems to have some sort of templating system similar to a distro called SME Server (formally e-smith). For example to permanently change the hostname in pardus you must modify an environment variable template file called /etc/env.d/01hostname. I also had to get rid of the default dns entries that pardus comes with and so I discovered the only permanent way is to remove (or comment out) the 3 entries in another template file called /usr/share/baselayout/resolv.conf
So my guess is that the fix for my problem is somewhat in-depth considering pardus is configured this way and if I had the full documentation (in English) for how this system works I would be much more comfortable with pardus in general.
And one more thing. When I type 'service list' at the command line I notice that it is color coded. The notable thing is that there are three services that are colored in bright neon green and those services are: avahi, microcode_ctl, and wpa_supplicant.
When I look in the 'Service Manager' gui I can see that these are the only three services that do not have the 'Run-on start' checkbox checked, yet all three of these services start automatically at boot...
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