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 mailme@tahirhashmi.scriptmania.com __________________________________ We, the rest of humanity, wish GNU luck and Godspeed