On Saturday 11 March 2006 17:24, Craig White wrote: > cli = command line interface > > recognize that the fundamental architecture of UNIX/Linux is 'C' > language and text configuration files. Knowing where the configuration > files are located and how to use an appropriate text editor is the key. > > GUI = graphic user interface > > recognize that the GUI tools that are available merely manipulate the > same text configuration files in the same locations...they just provide > the knowledge of where these files are and the GUI editor to edit them. > I think your judgement on this has been a little harsh. I would rather say that 20-30% of users are not confident of their ability to survive without the GUI. I still prefer to edit in kwrite myself, but I'm quite able to manage the few basic commands to get by in vi if I have to. I do speak from experience, though. When I arrived here from Mandriva a few weeks ago I was frankly a little nervous at losing my safety-net. I knew I would probably need to use the CLI more than I had done previously. To my amazement I found that, brain-farts apart, I did know most of what I needed, other than the slight differences in the way things are done between distros. > If you can function in command line, you can probably boot into single > user mode and fix about anything. If you require the GUI, then you have > to be able to boot into GUI mode to fix something. That issue was on > FC-4 as one of the updates updated some xorg stuff that broke run level > 5 (GUI) on many people's hardware and they had to actually get to > command line as root (probably run level 3) and run > 'system-config-display --reconfig' to fix things. > Hmm - I suffered a complete loss of X a couple of years ago through a broken mirror. It wasn't funny. And it couldn't be fixed by a tool such as system-config-display. The biggest problem, in that case, is losing the life-line of list support. Up to then I had never heard of the text browsers, but I've made sure that I could manage if I ever had to again, so at least I'd be able to use webmail to interface. FWIW, I'm in favour of clean install, from my past experience, but I have never yet managed to do two clean installs with identical results, even ignoring the obvious hardware-related differences ;-) Anne
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