Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 13:28:08 -0700 From: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> To: Thomas Good <tomg@mailhost.nrnet.org> Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Some food for thought... Message-ID: <393575D8.E311AF48@acuson.com> References: <Pine.LNX.3.96.1000530210821.16057A-100000@mailhost.nrnet.org>
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Thomas Good wrote: > I download src and do the build with gmake, then put the binaries where > I want em. It's the same on any box. So they all look pretty much > the same. You can do this on almost any unix implementation. Some people don't have the time to do this. I have a mere 400Mhz AMD, and compiling everything I have on my box would take a dozen hours or more. My general rule of thumb is to install binaries if they are available with the OS. If I need to go and specifically download something, then I'll compile it. > > know the Corel veneer, it won't do you any good for SuSE or Debian. And > > unlike typical open source software, these administration tools only > > work for the distro they're designed for. Proficiency in YaST is useless > > when you're faced with a Mandrake box. > > We are in agreement here my friend. It is like learning WordPerfect > as opposed to vi. ;-) You can't argue with the flexibility of the vi reveal codes :-) > > To the average Linux user, Debian is as different from Caldera as IRIX > > is from HPUX. > > I think you overstate a bit here, d-man... Yes, I may have used a bit of hyperbole. But I mean the *average* user. Otherwise known as the person who doesn't see the Big Unix Picture yet. This includes my Mom, my best friend, my neighbor and the guy two cubicles down. It also includes a lot of Unix developers! Think about it, if you've never done any adminstration before, most stuff in /etc is pretty incomprehensible. The popularity of the free unices is making a lot of people be their own sysadmins for the very first time. Because these people often just want to browse the web or write a document, they don't want to spend weeks getting up to speed on the ins and outs of networking or X Window configuration. Just as we don't expect that all drivers know how to tune up their cars, we shouldn't expect every Unix user to be a sysadmin. This is where the Linuxconfs and YaSTs are important. But it needs to be taken one step further, so that Linuxconf can be used on SuSE and YaST can be used on Redhat, and that neither gets in the way of the knowledgable sysadmin. David To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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