On Wed, 23 Jan 2002 21:39:06  
 Amish K. Munshi wrote:

>       Yes I agree with you, but I most of the work that we require to
>do is available as a GUI toolkit. And however integrated we are to the
>Linux systems, we would love to use the graphical version of linuxconf
>rather than the text version. 

There's a learning curve. When I started out, I was averse to the command line too. 
But as I began discovering commands for things that went click-click, I found myself 
using the command line more and more.

The reason is simple - it's easier to issue a command than fire up a GUI, sift thru 
the tabs and buttons et al. 

Say, you want to add a user to a new group. How'd you do it in GUI? Fire up Linuxconf, 
expand the trees till you reach the users area (I've forgotten what Linuxconf looked 
like, so it's a somewhat inexact reproduction), click on that user and then in his/her 
property sheet, specify the group somewhere. That done, you click the "Activate" 
button and then "Quit" hoping that things went fine. Same thing on the command line:

# usermod -G <group>[, ...] <user>

There's a command - apropos - that searches for the supplied keywords in short 
descriptions of all the entries in man pages. So, if you're looking for disk 
management commands, you can do:

$ apropos disk

and get a list of commands that have the word "disk" in their descriptions.

I don't say that GUI is bad. The user should figure out when to use what tool. As a 
rule of thumb, use a GUI tool when you are going to use a majority of the features it 
offers. So I may use LinuxConf when I get down to configuring my system after a fresh 
install. But not for the occasional tweaks and mods.

Tahir Hashmi (VSE, NCST)
http://tahirhashmi.scriptmania.com
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
__________________________________
We, the rest of humanity, wish GNU luck and Godspeed


_______________________________________________
http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers

Reply via email to