[LBo] A (shortish) introduction

[Stefan Waidele]

Brice Hunt schrieb:
> Isolde Ryan wrote:
>> Ps I'd be interested in hearing how K/Ubuntu limits your command-line capabilities .. 

Ubuntu made a bold step when they deactivated login for root, forcing 
users to use sudo as much as possible.

This is a reasonable security measure.

If I need to do something major as root, I simple do a "sudo su" and I 
have a root shell.

The fact that Ubuntu has very good GUI-tools for configuration tempts 
people (like me ) to use the GUI-tools, setting things up in a hurry 
without actually understanding how they work.
The same is true for other major distros like Suse, Fedora and others.

I actually used Suse since 5.3 without learning how to manually set up a 
soundcard! I consider myself pretty good at networking, but I need to 
look up "man route" and "man ifconfig" each and every time I need to use 
them, simply because I usually use GUI for setting up NICs.

I configure server-processes like Apache, Samba, Postfix by hand. I 
don't know when I had to read up the basics for those.

> What I noticed is that for changes made to certain configuration files
> to actually take effect, I had to run some obscure script that made the
> basic changes for me.

In Ubuntu? Can you give an example?

The reason I chose Ubuntu over Suse lately is that it gives me a plain 
Debian under the hood. The GUI-tools work on the original configuration 
files, and I CAN manually configure anything without messing up the 
GUI-config-tools.

So basically it boils down to doing things by hand if you want to 
understand them. A well chosen default-configuration and nice GUI-tools 
will tempt you to "do it quickly" and skip the learning.

But that's why LinuxBasics.org is offering the course :)

Stefan