On Wednesday 22 January 2003 01:09 pm, David Mandala wrote:
> I am a bit confused, I routinely install Red Hat without X or "X"
> capabilities and it is quite easily maintained and managed. In fact I
> only have X installed on my personal work stations, not at all on my
> servers or on the embedded devices I work with (with the exception of
> the embedded devices that are supposed to have a GUI).
>
> Can you explain further, how did you arrive at the conclusion that they
> require X in order to manage them?

Let's just put it this way. I spent the first few months of my employment at 
my current job as part of a team writing a system management web console for 
Red Hat Linux that would allow us to manage all aspects of a Red Hat system 
without "X". I won't tell you how much money we spent on that piece of 
software, but it was not cheap. (Sorry, it's proprietary, integrated as part 
of our storage clustering solution). I became quite adept at managing a Red 
Hat system without "X" while cleaning up what alpha copies of our software 
did to various system files (!), and compared to distros designed for hand 
management (or *BSD), Red Hat is a pain in the #$%@!. The various files are 
scattered willy-nilly rather than being where, e.g., the Samba Makefile 
normally puts them, and many files were not designed to be edited by humans 
at all (*YOU* reconstruct an ifcfg-eth0 file that got accidentally zeroed out 
-- WITHOUT going to another Red Hat machine and simply copying that one 
over). 

Anything is doable with Linux. Some things, however, are more aggravation than 
they're worth. Managing a Red Hat system without "X", in my opinion, is one 
of those. We did it, and do it, because a third party commercial driver we 
need is only supported under Red Hat. But a) it's a pain in the $W#%@ to get 
the distro pared down to the point where the "X" libraries and associate 
bloat aren't needed on your hard drive, and b) the system is a pain in the 
#$@%@ to manage once you get it pared to that point. We did it. We do it. It 
works. But it wasn't just a case of toss the disk into the drive and install. 
(Toss *WHICH* disk into the drive?! Red Hat is a multi-disk set now!). And 
oh, another beef: the Red Hat installer is the most slug-slow thing I've ever 
encountered. I don't know what happened between 6.2 and 7.3, but the 
installer went from being a speedy li'l bugger to being slower than the 
Windows installer. AGH!

I've been using Red Hat Linux since version 3.0.3, BTW, so I do know a LITTLE 
bit about Red Hat Linux...

-- 
Eric Lee Green          GnuPG public key at http://badtux.org/eric/eric.gpg
          mailto:eric@badtux.org  Web: http://www.badtux.org