From owner-freebsd-advocacy Thu Apr 16 13:53:33 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id NAA28871 for freebsd-advocacy-outgoing; Thu, 16 Apr 1998 13:53:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from ringworld.uniscape.com ([206.116.157.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id UAA28723 for ; Thu, 16 Apr 1998 20:52:03 GMT (envelope-from stefanos@ringworld.uniscape.com) Received: from traveler by ringworld.uniscape.com (NX5.67e/NX3.0M) id AA02400; Thu, 16 Apr 98 17:02:11 -0400 Message-Id: <9804162102.AA02400@ringworld.uniscape.com> Received: by traveler.uniscape.com (NX5.67e/NX3.0X) id AA01152; Thu, 16 Apr 98 17:02:06 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Nextstep-Mailer: Mail 3.3 (Enhance 2.0b5) Received: by NeXT.Mailer (1.118.2) From: Stefanos Kiakas Date: Thu, 16 Apr 98 17:02:04 -0400 To: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Promoting FreeBSD. Reply-To: stefanos@ringworld.uniscape.com Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by hub.freebsd.org id UAA28726 Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Woody Carey wrote: > On Thu, 16 Apr 1998, Stefanos Kiakas wrote: > The point of developing these tools is to allow people who are not familiar to FreeBSD and UNIX feel comfortable in doing day to day task, so they don't have to call for support. Once the box is setup there are many task which can be performed which will not affect the stability of the FreeBSD machine, like adding and deleting users. Such a tool will not prevent them from learning how to use UNIX and FreeBSD in general. It will make it easier because they will not feel intimidated. > b) Some users become severely limited in their ability to administer a > system that their business and perhaps their livelihood have come to > depend on, their abilities being strictly defined by what is and is > not in the web interface sysadmin tool. There are many companies which depend on tools and equipment for their livelihood, yet they are not experts at fixing these tools if they break. They call a professional or the manufacturer ro correct the problem if anything goes wrong. These GUI tools should allow clients to do day to day tasks without calling a professional. We all depend on automobiles to earn our livelihood, but there are very few people who can repair their automobile without taking it to a garage. I'm proposing we do the same for FreeBSD. We add a GUI layer on top of the text files used to configure the system. I don't want to replace the current text configuration file structure. > > In addition, this gui tool would have to be Very robust and work > basically perfectly, for it to be of any use to people who wanted to > use FreeBSD, but did not want to learn the system or the command line. Yes they have to be robust, but they should also be very focused on doing one task (i.e. managing users, managing NFS, etc). We could also have a help feature which would explain how to do the same thing, by editing the configuration files with a text editor. stef --- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Stefanos Kiakas stefanos@uniscape.com http://www.uniscape.com/ e-Scape Information Systems Inc. 514.878.1084 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message