[members at lugog] Introduction:

john lewis johnlewis at hantslug.org.uk
Fri Nov 26 13:38:43 UTC 2010


On Fri, 26 Nov 2010 10:34:22 +0000 (GMT)
MJ Ray <mjr at phonecoop.coop> wrote:

> john lewis wrote:
> > I learnt to use the command line because for most of my linux using
> > life I used windowmaker as my preferred interface and unlike gnome
> > that didn't do things like popping up an icon when I popped a CD in
> > the drive, plugged in a usb stick or my camera. So I got used to the
> > idea I had to go to a terminal and type in 'mount /dev/whatever' 
> 
> No, no-one's *had* to go to a terminal for that for ages.  There's
> udev, some automounters (I think amd was around when I started using
> GNU/Linux 15 or so years ago), or even simply adding commands to the
> windowmaker menu.  Using a terminal and typing was a choice... maybe
> the other options weren't known to you, but they were probably there.

Widowmaker hadn't had any development for several years and so didn't
have the bells and whistles of many other window-managers. But I liked
the uncluttered look, ie icon-free, it gave me and liked getting popup
menus at a mouse click rather than using 'panels'. 

So I got used to using a terminal and didn't investigate any other way
of mounting things. As a result I continue to use the command line for
quite a few things that could be done the gui way. 

In particular I always do 'aptitude safe-upgrade' from a terminal, I
use cron-apt to fetch any updated packages overnight. I once tried
using synaptic but found it un-reliable at that time so went back to my
command line.

 
-- 
John Lewis
using Debian sid 



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