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Don't get me wrong. The X Window System is
great, and were it not for the window managers and desktops that it
makes possible, the Linux user base would be a lot smaller than it is,
and any notion of Linux becoming a desktop operating system with wide
appeal would not exist.
But X is not Linux, and putting too much
reliance on a nice, graphical screen smiling at you may well one day be
something you regret.
Example: A few weeks ago, I downloaded and
installed a replacement X server designed to make my video card sing. I
installed it. Instantly, all sorts of applications ceased to function.
Well, I said to myself, it's about time that I installed XFree86-4.0
anyway. There are a lot of things that I compile regularly, some of them
pretty complicated and crucial. Rebuilding the kernel? A piece of cake.
But I've never compiled XFree and produced results that worked. And
already today something that seemed simple had gone terribly wrong.
So I poked around and found some
XFree86-4.0 rpms. I grabbed 'em--I'd done this before, four or five
times, no problem--and when they were all aboard the local drive, I
dumped out of what was left of my 3.3.5 and at the console attempted to
install the new, much improved, XFree.
Imagine my chagrin when, halfway into the
third package, the rpm program told me that there was something wrong
with one of the packages and it would not install.
The next couple of hours were too
horrifying and too embarrassing to recount. Let it suffice to say that
at one point I had pieces of three versions of XFree86 installed.
XF86Setup ran just fine, but the result wouldn't start, which was no big
surprise. And, of course, in my relaxed confidence--I'd done this before
with no problem--I hadn't backed up my semi-working version. So I
couldn't even get back online from my nice graphical desktop and try to
find a clean set of rpms.
I had a command prompt. And the sense that
clever use of the command prompt would be enough to solve the problem.
Had I the knowledge to use it cleverly?
This is just one of the multitude of cases
where your only friend is that $ prompt, which you can su into a #. You
will, sooner or later, face it yourself. The time to prepare for that
day is now. A broken system does not present the ideal milieu for
exploring the joys of new applications. And, as in the foggy distant
past when Windows 3.0 got released and, once the user learned to tip-toe
around UAEs, DOS skills disappeared, the increasingly elaborate new
graphical desktops for Linux impart complacency about needing
fundamental Linux skills.
Linux lets you do very nearly everything
from a simple command prompt, if you know the right commands. I don't
know them all. Do you? Did you know that the chmod command recurses
directories if you apply the -R option, while other commands do the same
thing if you apply the -r option? And if you do, do you use these
commands with sufficient frequency that you will remember them in the
pinch? Me neither. Man pages are often helpful, but they are also
sometimes a little obscure, which shortcoming is magnified when reading
them in high panic.
Fortunately, applications that will ease
your way already exist. You probably have some of them on your machine
already, though you may never have used them. |
