[Techtalk] Why is life without X important? (was: Re: info)

Michelle Murrain tech at murrain.net
Fri Sep 6 16:29:20 EST 2002


At 7:23 PM +0200 9/6/02, Rebecca J. Walter wrote:
>On Fri, 2002-09-06 at 19:10, Caitlyn M. Martin wrote:
>
>>  Anyone who does serious systems administration needs to be able to live
>  > without X.  My examples are three of many.

<snip>

>So, yes Carla, it is actually an issue for a lot of people.  Especially
>if you ever change anything on your box.

I had a fascinating experience a couple of weeks ago. I gave a 4 day 
linux workshop in NY to a bunch of folks who have been doing Windows 
systems administration for years. Now, I am someone who rarely 
bothers to run X on servers. And I have virtually no experience with 
any of the GUI admin tools.  Although I have a desktop with KDE, and 
have gotten very used to using KDE, I still never admin that box 
using the GUI tools (except for printer setup).

These folks were very uncomfortable with the command line, and spent 
actually quite a bit of time on their own learning how to use the GUI 
tools (which I couldn't help them much with, since I'd never used 
them).

But we did have fun using the GUI tools, then seeing what the GUI 
tools did to the config files. That's I think a really useful 
exercise, to get people into using the config files.

Personally, I don't think that many of the GUI config tools for Linux 
are quite ready for heavy prime-time use. But I can imagine a day 
when we all sort of scratch our heads, and say "Oh, yeah, wow, 
remember when we used to configure Samba by editing this text file?"
-- 
.Michelle

--------------------------
Michelle Murrain, Technology Consulting
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"A vocation is where the world's hunger & your great gladness meet."



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