[rescue] "I prefer a GUI"

[Jeffrey Nonken]

At 10:35 AM 6/14/2005, Wes Will wrote:
>First, this is - not - a flame, leave the asbestos shield alone.

'Sawright. Not everybody flamed me last time, but the guy who did sure made 
up for everybody who didn't.


>Third, grab about any old box you can scavenge with at least as much CPU
>horsepower as a "Pentium 133" (the more oomph! the better, of course; check
>for compatibility first, but just about any Sun SPARC, SGI, or PowerPC
>would be acceptable and preferred to the Wintel chips).  Install some form
>of *NIX on it.  Pick one of the BSD's, one of the myriad Linux distros,
>whatever suits you and the hardware, and anyone who wants to start a distro
>war can just fuheddabouddat, too.  It's not WHICH distro you use, it's that
>you USE ONE.
>
>Give it a network connection, and go to it, GUI and all, most of them come
>with.

I've got a Pentium III 600 with an Intel network card running FreeBSD 5.3 
with full source and Ports. I was looking into running gnucash, so I 
installed Gnome. Took some head banging but it runs. Will that do? :)


>Play.  Have fun.  Learn.  Enjoy the mouse and the graphics and all of it.

Been trying for a couple years now to learn. It's slow work. Not sure why, 
been a computer geek all my life. It should be easy. *sigh* Guess I'm just 
getting old, I dunno.

>Won't hurt my terminal-using feelings one bit, and anyone who gives you
>grief about your choices (rather than helpful and constructively-phrased
>supportive criticism and assistance in making -better- choices) especially
>when you're just getting started and learning, seriously needs a life and a
>clue.

I have no problem running a terminal, BTW. Even in Windows I use DOS and 
batch files all the time. I've also been connecting to my BSD box via 
Telnet, though most of what I've been doing the last few weeks is running 
portupgrade :).


>Accept the opinions of others, try them on for personal fit, adopt the ones
>that you like and not the ones you don't.  Maybe you'll figure out what the
>fuss is about, and switch to a terminal once you find your way around a bit.

So far it's been my experience that knowing the terminal stuff is critical 
for the setup. I've tried Solaris 9 on SPARC, several flavours of Linux 
(mostly Mandrake, though I've played with Slackware a bit too), NetBSD and 
FreeBSD.


>I hope to make a bundle writing some decent manuals.  Check the bookshelves
>early next year....I hope.

I hope you do too, decent manuals are worth their weight in gold. I hope 
you write some, and whomever manages to write them deserves to make a bundle.


>Have a frippin' blast with your GUI, chum.  Enjoy the hell outta the thing.
>  Blessings be upon you and your house.  May your children wed young.  The
>Source be with you, and any other silly platitude you'd like to tack on.

How about "May you live in interesting times?" Oh wait, that's a curse. :)

Thanks for the support. Mostly, though, I need to finish moving out of this 
house before I start any new projects. It's not been easy, I'll tell ya.

Second, I'd prefer to migrate my backup system first before I do anything 
else. I'd like to back up all my data, not just my Windows boxen, and 
Retrospect just won't do that without an enormous monetary expenditure. 
Bacula looks like my favorite choice so far, but it looks like it will 
require some brow sweat.

For now I think I'm going to migrate this email list over to Pocomail. If I 
can't stand it, I can always migrate back.