On 2/10/11 10:28 AM, Glenn Stone wrote:
Yabbut, what UI is a sysadmin who's been doing this for 20+ years .....
oh.
Was that an actual sentence? I'm having trouble parsing it.
I'm guessing that people who would choose Ubutnu are folks like me, who have
been staring at a shell prompt on their personal desktops since G-d was a
little boy, and more than likely work in majority-*ix shops. I'm also
guessing that Red Hat gets a lot more use in houses which have a lot more
Windows (and people who strongly prefer graphical interfaces).
Pretty sure that any attempt at being command line friendly on Ubuntu
actually comes from Debian. All the work that Canonical does is very
desktopy end user centric.
As for Red Hat, we do have customers with mixed environments. You'd be
hard pressed to find a large corporation or university that doesn't have
a mixed environment. The fact that our manual install process happens
to prefer a graphical interface for advanced configuration doesn't
really play much into that though. Nearly every large site uses
kickstart for system deployments and shell based config management
systems. Trying to do large scale automated system installation and
deployment with Debian or Ubuntu is a pretty horrific task. The
traditional debian automated installation is a rock on the enter key.
Hm. At least at 5.4, there's still not an encrypt ticky-box in
system-config-kickstart either, which means you either have to generate the ks
file by hand (which can involve multiple instances of slamming your head
against the wall as you suss out the errors) or go build a prototype by hand
using the GUI installer.
5.4 is pretty ancient technology. I wouldn't expect things to change
much, Enterprise stability requirements get in the way. Of course,
being a freeloader you don't have access to RHEL6 yet, although you can
get an evaluation copy from RHT which will give you access to all the
new stuff. That said, I don't know if system-config-kickstart got
updated enough in recent time, Anaconda has gone through a major rewrite
since the RHEL5 days.
:/
And FWIW? I don't know if it's true in 5.5, but in 5.4 the man page for
system-config-kickstart still said "4th Berkeley Distribution" on the
footer, and had been since 4.8 (the other system I checked). Jesse? might
wanna file a doc bug. Yeah, it's a nitpick. But enterprise-class Linux
ought to mean enterprise-class documentation.
Perhaps you could buy a license and use your support contract to get
that fixed.
Or you could file a bug in Fedora, which is as close to the "upstream"
as this project has.
--
Jesse Keating RHCE (http://jkeating.livejournal.com)
Fedora Project (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JesseKeating)
GPG Public Key (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
identi.ca (http://identi.ca/jkeating)
