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(a)tahirhashmi.scriptmania.com
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We, the rest of humanity, wish GNU luck and Godspeed