What you wrote was beautiful!
Personally I feel the LPIC-1's section on X management is enough cause KDE and Gnome are just fluff.
There are too many window managers to really appease the community for a certification on the desktop.
You just know the XFCE bunch will get mad if you don't do a section on their WM.
And why settle with just a desktop cert?
Any real job is going want someone who's a command line commando anyway..
And just one last thought. Anything that breaks in Linux usually needs to be fixed from the cli anyway
so you might as well get the skill.
Oh yeah, Linux man law:
while drink beer ; do code through terminal with vi; firefox playboy.com for eye candy; done with a smile :)
Best Regards,
Danny Williams JR
Act As One Technologies
http://www.aaotech.com
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [lpi-discuss] Shouldn't there be a desktop LPI
Certification?
From: Evan Leibovitch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, February 27, 2008 7:47 pm
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], "General discussion relating to LPI."
<[email protected]>
IOANNIS MANOLOUDIS wrote:
> The LPIC 1,2 and 3 certifications are addressing almost totally the server
> side of Linux. With Linux growing more and more and expanding into the
> desktop market, I believe that we are in need of an additional certification
> to cover the Linux desktop.
> Following LPI's philosophy, it should be vendor-neutral.
> What do you think?
Hello Ioannis,
You raise a very good question, but also a very complex one. The issue
of a desktop certification was debated within LPI almost from its
beginning.
As some of us examined existing desktop certifications (such as MOUS and
ECDL), we quickly found evidence that the LPI delivery and development
models have severe obstacles adapting to a desktop environment. The most
obvious of many difficulties is that the current LPI program is based on
command-line statements, and desktop actions are accomplished in a
graphical paradigm. How would one ask, for instance "what is the
preferred method to change the default timezone under KDE" using a
multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank question? Microsoft has spent more
than a million dollars in this area, yielding results that are expensive
to deliver and by some measures are still far from satisfactory.
At another level, there is certainly no unanimous definition of "the
Linux desktop". Along with the obvious difficult choices ("KDE or
GNOME?" "Evolution or Thunderbird?") are many less-obvious design issues
to deal with.
Indeed, there is significant interest in the "open source desktop" which
goes beyond Linux-kerneled systems. One popular approach in this area is
to concentrate on the environment and applications rather than the OS.
It is notable that software such as OpenOffice, Thunderbird, the Gimp
and even KDE are available for multiple operating systems... including
MS-Windows.
And finally, fiscal prudence demands answers to core questions:
- who would take such an exam?
- why would they spend money to take it?
- what would they be prepared to pay?
The ultimate question, from the business perspective is: "will enough
people pay to take the exam to cover its substantial development and
delivery costs?" The answer to this is not easy. It is not a coincidence
that many groups -- LPI, Red Hat, Novell, Comptia and others -- have
created Linux system administration certification systems, yet none has
indicated even a serious intention to do a desktop cert. The financial
justification is very difficult using current models.
If you need to consider something in the short term, you may want to
investigate some of the adaptations of the ECDL program for FOSS
software such as OpenOffice. One example is the Irish OpenApp program:
http://www.openapp.ie/sections/products/training-for-openoffice
For the longer term... I am aware of a growing number of people who are
actively developing the innovative models required to deliver desktop
skills certification programs that serve this community's unique needs.
Anyone interested in these initiatives is invited to contact me
personally and off-list
Evan Leibovitch
LPI Co-founder
email: evan@telly.org
Skype: evanleibovitch
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