on Wed, Nov 08, 2000 at 11:44:24AM +0100, Peter Hugosson-Miller (pehu@im.se) wrote: > A question for all Linux gurus out there: > > I have encountered a program called 'linuxconfig' Surely ou mean "linuxconf"? > which, on the face of it, appears to be a useful system tool. It is a > curses- based program, that knows where all the various debian system > files are, and allows root to modify users, groups, networking > configuration and so on. If you're talking about linuxconf, we know about it. Most more experienced admins frown on such tools -- it's an additional layer of cruft between you and what you want to do. It's a new tool to learn, which may or may not be different on other systems. It may introduce new security vulnerabilities on a system. It may automate the process of scrambling your system state beyond recovery (a problem I had with some early versions of Linuxconf). I've used Unix systems since 1987, GNU/Linux since 1997, and Debian for just over a year. I learned more in the first two months of running Debian -- because I was both admin of the box and *didn't* have a bunch of "friendly" tools getting in my way, than I did in the previous ten years of using and running Unix. There are a number of GNU/Linux-based configuration tools, including a graphica RPM administrator from Red Hat, YAST from SuSER, tools from Mandrake and TurboLinux, Corel, etc. Linuxconf is at least distribution-neutral, but I've never had to go there. There are a couple of tools which can be helpful -- printtol and pppconfig are two I swear by. But in general, you're better off getting comfortable with the guts of config files and how they work. My advice: dump it. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://www.netcom.com/~kmself Evangelist, Zelerate, Inc. http://www.zelerate.org What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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