Re: Shaken, not stirred (Mini-rant)

On 2008-12-04, anti..what..ever_you_got <anti> wrote:
Kevin Wilcox <kevin.wilcox@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:slrngjgjs6.iit.kevin.wilcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

On 2008-12-03, anti..what_ever_you_got <anti> wrote:

I'm just a lowly Linux newbie so I'll stick with something a little
easier than Slackware. :)

That's a bad mindset to take.

In your opinion. ;)

Hehe well, yes, I can't argue with that. It's certainly my opinion!

What I meant was that just because you're new to the GNU/Linux world
doesn't mean you need to stick with an easy distribution. In my humble
opinion, it's not that one distribution is that much easier than
another, it's that they are easy in different ways. I'll explain below
as it's apropos.

I've seen plenty of folks start off with
Slackware and some start off with Gentoo and they do just fine. The
problem is when they go to something like Fedora or Ubuntu and the GUI
clickies keep getting in their way when they try to do something "the
Linux way" but the darn distros insist on using their convoluted GUI.

You say "toe-may-toe" and I say "toe-mot-toe.

IMO CLI is the past, GUI is the future. If Linux is to compete with other
OS's then IMO GUI is the *only* way. RDFC

This could be opening a whole different can of worms but I'll go with
it.

I can't stand a heavy GUI. I detest click-through wizards. I hate not
knowing exactly what my configurations are doing and why. Several years
ago, around the time of Samba 2.0, I was tasked with setting up a few
Samba servers to replace some aging Windows machines and because my
company wanted to investigate GNU/Linux. It was the first time I'd setup
Samba so I used SWAT. After a few hours of working out problems I
deleted everything in the config file (thankfully SWAT wrote to the
appropriate file) and started from scratch with the man page for
smb.conf. There were a few tweaks I needed to make but at the end of an
hour I knew *exactly* what every line in that config file did and why it
was there and why I had put it there. More importantly I could
tweak the config in short order from anywhere that had ssh access to the
smb servers without having the overhead of a GUI.

Now, that was some time ago (10 years?) but I've been a GNU/Linux and
*BSD admin since and nothing on the server side has changed. The GUI
tools are a little cleaner but they still write configs that are full of
extraneous settings and if you ever have to tweak them manually there's
no certainty that your edited config will be what gets read when the
GUI configurator is used again.

What's worse is when you get used to doing it a certain way with the
tools in one distribution, but with no real understanding of what's
going on behind the scenes, and then move to another distribution and
have to learn *that* set of tools. It's much, much more efficient and,
in my humble opinion, much more useful, to know what's going on at that
lower level so it doesn't matter what the distro tool is, you can always
go to the config file and know exactly what you're doing.

At that point you
could either a) edit the distro-specific network config files to get
connected or b) create a wpa_supplicant.conf file, call wpa_supplicant
by hand and then dhclient/dhcpcd.

If there's a difference there it's too subtle for me.

It'll make sense if you start doing any distro-hopping or if you go from
GNU/Linux to *BSD. You can either spend the time to learn how an
individual distribution does something and then take the time to learn
how your next distro does the same thing or you can take the time to
learn what needs to happen behind the scenes and apply it to any
distribution you come across.

Welcome to the community!

kmw

--
Linux because I have to
FreeBSD because I want to
OpenBSD because I can
.

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