[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
tech at murrain.net http://www.murrain.net
413-253-2874 ph
413-222-6350 cell
413-825-0288 fax
AIM:pearlbear0 Y!:pearlbear9 ICQ:129250575
"A vocation is where the world's hunger & your great gladness meet."
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