An old article that struck me!!! http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5489 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ With Linux moving to the desktop, life gets more complicated for system administrators.
Until now, system administrators running Linux have had it fairly easy. But this won't last long. Why? Well, until now Linux has been basically a server OS. The GUI, and therefore window manager, was just a pretty option. But as Linux moves to the desktop, the Linux system administrator's life becomes much more complicated. Now, it's not just a matter of knowing how to configure sendmail, DNS and Apache, but being able to fix GUIs users have managed to break somehow. That means knowing, inside and out, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, TWM, FVWM, MWM, Blackbox, etc. Sure, your present company may dictate KDE and enforce the choice. But another company will push GNOME or any of a dozen other WMs. Then there's the rogue ``power user'' who knows enough to be dangerous and has installed a private copy of his or her favorite WM. I've looked at the KDE configuration files and I'm awed. My /opt/kde/share/config has more files than /etc. Guess I'll be figuring them out for a while. Then it's on to GNOME. Yes, I know there are GUI config tools for all this. And that's all well and fine when you're standing in front of the system. But when the broken system is on the other end of a 56k dial-up connection, vi is still my tool of choice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ So next time you get stuck with getting gdm up and running with your not so favorite bloated Window Manager after an XFree86 Upgrade don't consider sneering at desktop configuration problems any longer. So dear gurus its no longer geeky enough to use shell/Emacs ( or vim if its me ) to configure a few servers ( even complex setups involving multiple hosts are pretty easy ) which require tweaking a few config files at best and few perl scripts here and there( replace with your favorite scripting language ) . Take to the complexity of the desktop and feel dwarfed before it. "Thou shalt be overwhelmed by zillions of configuration files. Period." The problem with Desktops as against servers is they are much more numerous and much more diverse :-( . -- http://www.tarundua.net Give me back my shell _______________________________________________ ilugd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
