Re: stuff and the thing

[Steven Pritchard <steve@osiris.silug.org>]

mike packard said:
> Also, regarding Caldera: Did anyone else not really like using it after
> they had it installed?  I thought that the install was pretty nice.  
> However, when I rebooted I didn't even feel like I was in Linux anymore.  
> Not that graphical logins are horrible, but I couldn't figure out how to
> turn it off.

You probably need to find a line like

    id:5:initdefault:

in /etc/inittab, change the 5 to 3 (at least on Red Hat, comments at
the top of the file say "3 - Full multiuser mode"), and do "init 3" or
reboot.

> I also find KDE very uncomfortable because (like Windows)
> it's easy and convenient to configure the things they have menus for, but
> very difficult, to do what there isn't a menu for.

It works well for managing lots of xterms.  :-)

> It seems to me that
> this whole "getting Linux on the desktop" movement is doing a lot more
> "Hey we can imitate Windows." and not enough "Hey, we're so much cooler
> than windows, see!"  The whole thing (RedHat is doing this too) just
> seemed very clogged and messy.

On the desktop side, Linux distributions have to fight Windows
{95,98,NT,2K}.  On the server/workstation side, the Linux
distributions have to fight all the "real Unix" systems that all now
come up by default in CDE.  By coming up in a GUI by default, Linux
gives lusers the impression that it is a "real OS".  (Every real OS
has a GUI, right?)  It also gets rid of that "X is too hard to set up"
crap you hear from new users (which more often than not translates
into "I screwed this up, and now I can't fix it").

I actually rather like having the system come up to [gkx]dm.  It makes
the system look nice even when it isn't doing anything, plus it means
I don't have to try to remember how to configure xdm when I want to
hang an X terminal (or whatever) off the machine.  (The exception here
is gdm in RH6...  I can't seem to get it to allow network logins.  One
of these years I'll have to figure that out...)

I have to tell you all that all of these recent (mostly cosmetic)
changes in the distributions have had a major effect on the perception
that the people I work around have with Linux.  Stuff more-or-less
"just works" out of the box in a large corporate environment.

> Example: A "minimum" install from Caldera
> 2.2 installed full-blown KDE along with all its stuff and that gui login
> thingy.  

Caldera is going after a completely different audience.  That's why
I've never been a user of their distribution, even though they've had
the slickest package for a while now.  (Does the Caldera installer
even give you the option of selecting individual packages?)

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Linux Users of Central Illinois
(217)698-1694             | Meetings the 4th Tuesday of every month
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.luci.org/ for more info

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