Hi I will discuss drakconnect and my perceptions. This setup has two boxes, a firewall with Mdk 9.1 and a user box with different Linux distributions.
Firewall setup. My firewall has a stable IP and many local DNS's. During setup I only have the right to setup one DNS server. The reason for more DNS servers might be justified as this is a university student LAN. => Mdk has minimized the Linux way of choice, for graphical reasons? When going to the next card I am giving the IP for eth1 as 192.168.1.1. But to my memory I am not asked for a 'local LAN name server' deposit. Thus two choices are hidden to me, if I want the router to know the names of the local LAN and, compared to Microsoft, if I want the router to have a per session cache for most visited URL's. As this setup does not function I have to visit 'drakconnect sharing', and find that the name on eth0 is given to eth1 as well, and that 192.168.1.1 is setup as DNS server for 192.168.1.252. Slackware advices its user to not allow 192.169.1.1 to be given as DNS server for speed reasons. This is what I call a communistic decission tree, which comes out as authoritarian in your view. That is to say the right way to do it has already been choosen. Thus the reason for the decission is the right one not a choosen one of many possible ones. This leads to a Linux specific question: Is the GUI interface used to hide or help a newbie? I have always thought that the hiding of a text boot to a newbie is stupid. As long as every decission taken is given a 'OK' then no newbie should have to be afraid of what a large enterprice a server is. Along this line I think that possible decissions should be shown and the position for the user to enlarge or widen his choice by a later come back should be adviced. Thus Mdk should have 'navigation plan' as in " Navigare necesse est vivere non est necesse". To me this plan has to coincide with the plan from the user community, if you want them to cooperate in its fullfillment. Personally I have always found the Mdk boot structure stupid as it had no way to stop an installation and cleanly jump out. Thus you may have to go as RedHat, not mount and format until every choice by the user is done. regards guran -- Mandrake Linux Cooker 9.2 kernel-2.4.22.10mdk-1-1mdk VERSION:20030924 21:50 Only in a society that has 'a priori' defined what is the truth can the result from the evolution of life be defined false.
