[Techtalk] Why is life without X important? (was: Re: info) X is not the point!

[Carla Schroder]

On Friday 06 September 2002 10:10 am, Caitlyn M. Martin wrote:
> Hi, Carla,
>
> > Is this really an issue?
>
> To anyone who has been a sysadmin for a long time, yes, it's a real
> issue.  If X stops working you need to be able to live at the command
> line.
>
> > Are you working on the Last Computer On Earth? I
> > always have a connected, functioning PC available. When I visit client
> > sites I bring my trusty notebook.  You can't depend on the sick PC to
> > help!
>
> Ah... but I administer many headless Sun boxen, as in no video card.
> These are production servers.  I inherited one with filesystem
> corruption which died a week after I got here.  I had to use that
> notebook you mention to get a console terminal through a serial port.
> So.. no X.  Also no network.  Just a serial port.  No command line=no
> fix.
>
><snip>

> Anyone who does serious systems administration needs to be able to live
> without X.  My examples are three of many.
>
> Later,
> Caity

This is very cool information, but what does it have to do with man pages? 
See the original message below. I'm talking about accessing man and info 
pages, and other technical docs, not performing amazing feats of server 
recovery. X is not the point, the point is it's irrelevant what format man 
and info pages come in, as long as you have a healthy computer to read them 
on. I suppose someday you could be on a desert island with failing battery 
and only minutes to read 'man rescue' in xterm......


On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 12:03:54AM -0400 or thereabouts, Beth Johnson wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-09-05 at 18:15, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> 
> > I have discovered something interesting -- man -H or man --html gives
> > HTML output!  It displays the manpage in lynx or in the browser defined
> > by $BROWSER.  So you can ignore everything I said about webmin, and go
> > 
> > BROWSER=mozilla man --html fsck
> > 
> > and it will display the manpage for fsck in your current browser window
> 
> Hmm, I'm running RH 7.3 with man 1.5j and get "invalid option --html"

This is because there are two different packages which provide the
command 'man'. Some distros, such as RH, ship the one called 'man' 
which has version numbers as you described. Other distros, such as
Debian, ship man-db, which has version numbers like 2.3.20. 

They have different command-line options and different configuration
files in /etc.

This comes up a lot. I am also using RH and haven't yet found a 
'turn into HTML output' option. I haven't looked very hard yet
though. 

> That sucks because I hate reading the man pages in a term window.

The best I can say is that you get used to it. And the lowest 
common denominator is very useful when trying to work out why 
X has stopped working.

Telsa