Debian Updates

[JoeHill]

On Wed, 26 Nov 2003 13:38:23 -0500 (EST)
"Keith Mastin" <kmastin-PzQIwG9Jn9VAFePFGvp55w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

> Until webmin doesn't work, then you're screwed. Every one of those little
> stars means something, and having one missing could lead to alot of
> confusion.
> 
> But let's not limit the discussion to cron, guis can be used to 'kind of'
> configure a lot of other programs, including bind9 and apache, no? So why
> do you need to learn anything about virtual hosts or really much of
> anything else if you have a gui that can do it for you?
> 
> I prefer be able to dial into the server while on vacation in Hawaii and
> reconfigure as needed. IMHO anything else is a cheat if you have the
> capabilities but refuse to learn how to use them.

I think that's a little extreme, when you take into account different levels of
users, and I think you need to. For each person, there is a level of comfort,
and if we want to expand the Linux desktop user base, we're going to have to
accept that not everybody sees the CLI as the elegant, powerful, and exact tool
that it is. What do you say to the Windows refugee who says "where's my
Scheduled Tasks?!", tell them to read man crontab? They'll drop it like a hot
potato and run screaming back. Which is *why* some kind-hearted souls came up
with sol'ns like cron-apt, Webmin, or in Mandrake the Cron tool in Control
Center.

Not everybody wants to be, or should need to be, a guru who can decipher man
pages, just because they want to use Linux. This is exactly why we have a
variety of solutions, distros, etc.

-- 
JoeHill ++ ICQ # 280779813
Registered Linux user #282046
Homepage: www.orderinchaos.org
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