Fedora Linux

[David J Patrick]

Marcus Brubaker wrote:

>On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 15:22, JoeHill wrote:
>  
>
>>On Wed, 05 Nov 2003 15:15:30 -0500
>>David J Patrick <davidjpatrick-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org> uttered:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>A central, intelligent and (ablove all) GUI way to handly the
>>>otherwise arcane system variables.
>>>      
>>>
>>Webmin should do tha trick there, mate. You would not believe the many
>>and varied tools available through this wondrous interface.
>>
>>Does Apache, User management, Postfix, sets cron jobs, whatever you
>>want.
>>    
>>
>
>As a techie I whole-hearted agree here.  Webmin is a beautiful package
>(although I could really wish they had chosen a better front end than
>http) but would fail miserably for what I think David was after. 
>  
>
Yes and no; I'm going to explore webmin, as it my address my admin needs.
Yet, I doubt that those new(er) to linux (esp. debian) would find it an 
appropriate solution.

>Marketing to desktop users means marketing to people who aren't likely
>to want to configure apache, postfix, bind, sendmail or any of the other
>dozens of packages webmin supports.  They want things like "what devices
>are connected", "how do i configure my network connection", "where do I
>change the default screensaver", "where can I configure my proxies" and
>other such things.
>  
>

I think a really promising package along these lines is the combination

>of the GNOME Control Center (since around 2.4) and Gnome System Tools. 
>In some ways the jury is still very much out with respect to GST.  "Just
>working" with each distribution is not an easy task, especially when you
>have the lofty goal of not destroying the config files or running a
>parallel "configuration database" (a la the well intentioned, but
>ill-fated linuxconf).
>  
>
I though linuxconf was the bees knees! Where d'it go ?

>I may be diverging a bit here, but this is sadly a really hard problem
>to solve.  For one, I don't think most vendors want it solved. 
>Easy-to-use, well integrated system configuration is something that
>vendors are well positioned to do and can easily distinguish themselves
>with.  Beyond that you have a whole crowd of UNIX purists that will
>scream bloody murder if you try to overhaul linux/unix system
>configuration in a coherent and modern way.  (Albeit, there is
>definitely a lot of validity in the argument that the current config
>system (ie, none/ad hoc text files) works so don't fix it.)  So even if
>the vendors *did* want to work on standardizing these things (through
>the LSB or some such) they risk pissing off a good contingent of users
>and getting to keep both pieces of a stillborn standard.  (And we all
>know how many of those there are....)
>
>Enough rambling for now.  Back to my parallel computation homework...
>  
>
If linux contunues to standardize, which it must to survive,
I can only imagine that GUI tools could be developed to compliment the 
existing morass of
text file based configuration. power users can carry on unhindered, by 
GUI and those
with less expertise will have a shot at keeping their boxes working. No 
conflict, right ?
in the mean time it's man this and man that with a healthy dose of TLUG 
wtf ???
djp


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