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

Charlotte charlotte.oliver at rcn.com
Fri Sep 6 16:51:36 EST 2002


> 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).

I'm watching my boss go through that same thing.  I was hired by a
Windows shop and finally convinced my management to let me set up a
linux server.  My boss has never really used Windows, so the first thing
he wanted to know was how to get into XWindows.

But it was a server (and not one to serve XWindows), so I hadn't
installed it.  I've showed him a few things but for the most part he's
looked suspiciously at the server and let me run it by myself.

I've suggested that we turn an old computer into a RedHat desktop so
that he can get used to admin before I let him run wild on my server.
*cough*  OUR server.  Right. :)
(He left himself logged in as root overnight once!  I'll forgive
him...eventually.)
 
> 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.

That's a good point - should he take me up on the challenge, maybe I can
try that with him.

Charlotte




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