[wplug] If I were a Linux consultant...

[John Harrold]

Sometime in September Alex Birch assaulted the keyboard and produced:

| > Why don't you email her a script and have her save it to her desktop?
| Not to be pissy, but I clearly stated the problem was "to walk her through
| using ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0 to re-establish and internet connection."
| 
| > You could name it "Reset the internet connection".
| She would have had to go to another person's house and print it off then
| I'd have to explain how to type that in and do chmod 0755. I though it was
| simple enough just to do:
| su -
| ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0
| 
| but then su in red hat 8.0 didn't add the right path.

'su ' and 'su - ' are  different. the first has your path while the
latter has roots.  check out the man page for su the '-' makes the shell a
login shell.

| Why doesn't linux do what OS X does and automatically connect when there
| is an internet connection?

because if i want my computer connected to a hostile network i'll tell it
to do so.

| OS X also allows people to double click on something and it'll open. I'm
| not sure how to associate zip files with ark for her on KDE.

i don't know about 8, but in 9 i can click on a zip file in konqueror and
it will show the files contents.

| I'm just saying that linux has a long way to go before it's end user
| friendly.

redhat has most of these point and click features you speak of. it does
have a little way to go though.

| (One other pet peeve) Why not do the following:
| 
| ln -s /dev /hardware
| ln -s /home /users
| ln -s /bin /system-programs
| ln -s /usr/bin /user/programs
| ln -s /sbin /administrator-programs
| ln -s /etc /configuration

because you can. really i would have no use for those links, but i'm
familiar with linux. i'm assuming these are things you find in osX. i guess
a better question would have been, why did the folks at apple feel the need
to create yet another directory structure? the nice thing about linux/unix
is that if someone is familiar with another system, then they do what ever
they like. i'm also not too sure where /usr/sbin would fit in there. 

i personally prefer the explicit nature of linux. if you want something you
have to tell the computer you want it. while it could be made a little
easier, i don't think it's overly difficult as things currently stand.

-- 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                               | /"\
 john harrold                                  | \ / ASCII ribbon campaign
      jmh at member.fsf.org                    |  X  against HTML mail
           the most useful idiot               | / \
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless,
 whether the mad destruction is brought under the name of totalitarianism or
 the holy name of liberty and democracy?
 --Gandhi
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
gpg --keyserver keys.indymedia.org --recv-key F65A739E
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://penguin.wplug.org/pipermail/wplug/attachments/20030918/6c601954/attachment-0001.bin