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

Telsa Gwynne hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk
Sat Sep 7 11:51:18 EST 2002


On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 10:53:57PM -0700 or thereabouts, Carla Schroder wrote:
> 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.
[...] 
> > Anyone who does serious systems administration needs to be able to live
> > without X.  My examples are three of many.
> 
> 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......

Since I wrote the original message, I'll chime in. I said this...

> > 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

...because I was specifically thinking of the times when X dies
and suddenly you can't use xman, konqui, gnome-help-browser, 
yelp, or whatever X-based application you use for man pages.
At that stage you have to be able  at least to cope with man
pages on an 80x25 (typically) terminal. 

I think all Caity's examples are good ones, as were the replies
talking about "I built a box where the video card turned out not
to be supported by XFree 86" and "have you seen the latency 
of running X apps remotely?" I've met both of those: a change
in XFree86 mean that suddenly my card was not working when I
upgraded; and ssh over a 28.8 is bad enough without deciding
you are going to run an X app remotely too. Sometimes I have
wanted particular man pages which are only available on another
box. An rpm or apt-get one is likely only to be on specific
distros; and ls has different options in BSD and Linux; and
then of course there's the two different man packages that
started all this. And if that box is not local and involves
using the modem, I am not startng X just to get a fancy man
display. 

One other example about the value of reading man pages:
when you want to do something in X like: 
  o add a second pointer;
  o remap the pointer buttons to something other than "123"->"321"
  o get X to let you flip through different resolutions when you
distro-provided tool assumes that although you have specified
several, you will only ever want to use one;
  o add a pixel to 1024x768 to make it 1024x769 if you happen to
have a MediaGX and a particular XFree86 release. (Yes, this was 
a genuine workaround I used to need all the time :))

All of these require editing XF86Config, and for all of them
except the final one (which is one of those weird ones you just
have to be told about) you _will_ need the man pages. Or your 
backup of the file you made earlier, of course :)

As for "running the last computer on earth", well. I don't
consider them low-specc'd (particularly not by comparison
with the hand-helds people put Linux onto), but other people
do. Only very recently I saw someone's machine specs and 
misread the video RAM as the RAM on the box itself. It had
not occurred to me that videocards had that much in them.
Some of the videocards seem to have more RAM in them than
my computer has.

I will add that after years (quite literally) of whinging
that I hated the info interface, I finally bothered to read 
the navigation menu at the top of every page. I am by no
means able to whizz through pages unerringly, but I have 
learned at least to be able to read through the nodes for
the information I want. And the information in info, for
GNU utilities, is often much more what I need than the
information in man.

Telsa



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