> On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 11:14:48AM +1300, Carl Cerecke wrote: > > Jason Greenwood wrote: > > >I fully understand Peter. I too have been frustrated in the past by > > >CLUG's CLI leanings and lack of desktop/end user focus. I hope, that > > >starting with my talk, the CLUG can begin a new era of a more balanced > > >focus on all levels of Linux user/tweaker/hacker. > > > > The CLI (Command line interface) is the foundation. Everything else is > > built on top, so to speak. Like a house, most people are interesting in > > using the house, not crawling under it to look at the foundations. > > Which is where the Mac OS X world is today - a small house, admittedly, > with rounded corners and no sharp knives hanging around ... > > The foundations are sound, however, and big enough to go build a proper > house on them (using fink to install all your normal open source > software). Perhaps someone will come up with a full distribution-sized > CD with lots of current fink stuff on it ... (not me until I get off a > modem link :-) > > The only problem is the underlying filesystem ... HFS is case > insentitive! UFS is fine, but you'll have to repartition to get one (or > mount the filesystem from a disk-image file, which may not be as fast as > a real partition, but isn't a bad way to do it ...) > > I think your point was going to be that many LUG people have been > builders and carpenters, but now perhaps we need realtors as well? > > -jim
The other thing to take into acount is that using email it is much easier to explain a command line (text based method) that it is a Gui based one as we can enter the text commands into the email. Emails a text based medium of communication (at least at the moment any way) and therefore text based stuff will make more sence and be quicker to explain. It's hard to give GUI based instructions in text unless the person your giving them to understands the system very well. (if they did they often wouldn't be asking the Question in the first place). Also lots of the question asked in this list are things that texted based is best for. How many questions do we have on using a Openoffice or Mozilla? Both are typical GUI based tasks instead when get questions like howto install some thing or update something and so forth and what is easier to express in text. This? Click Mandrake > Configuration > packageing > Software Installer . Allow it to load click Workstaion > Multimedia > xmms click install. Or this? as root run this. urpmi xmms (you can paste it into gnome or kde's terminal). Sure that is rather an extreme example but many of the other q's asked can be solved in similar ways. This may be due to the current gui config tools still needing more work it's hard to tell. But Windows GUI tools still suffer the same problems and it has been a GUI OS for alot longer than GNU/linux. And with windows the problem is that theres often no cli tools to fall back on. (any one know how to update Windows with all the latest security patches with only one command?). Chad
