[Wylug-help] Where are ifconfig, route etc under FC4?

[Dave Fisher]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 09:19:39AM +0100, John Hodrien wrote:
<snip>
> >On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 19:24 +0100, Dave Fisher wrote:
> >>Have they been deprecated in the RH world or subsumed under new names,
> >>etc?
> You must have a very low opinion of FC4 to think that they'd get rid of 
> those commands.

Not at all, just complete ignorance of FC and a sometimes clumsy form of
expression.

I don't suppose that I would have bothered asking if I had really
thought they were gone and I'm sure that I would have found them
eventually  ... I was simply in a hurry and experience has taught me
that it is usually quickest to ask someone who already knows the answer.

Thanks very much for validating the hypothesis.  The details you
provided were very helpful.

Running many distros under Xen has been very instructive. 

The range of different tools and policies has proved even wider than I
had expected.  

Although it's not too difficult to find anologues of practices from one
distro on another, I've found it quite time-consuming.

The experience has, nevertheless, helped me to come up with at least one
positive answer to Jim's Monday night question about whether or not
there was any longer a reason for LUGs to continue.

At the present, LUGs are one of very few institutions where people from
different places in the open source world can interact and exchange
information in a relatively civilised and non-superficial way.

I am pretty convinced that without such exchange, many of the 'benefits'
of open source are largely theoretical.  

It is, for example, vastly easier for the average person to deepen their
knowledge of a single distribution than it is to deepen their generic
Linux knowledge, because the providers put in place the infrastructure
for learning (not just commercial training, but documentation,
tutorials, fora, conferences, wikis, etc.).

In the absence of good quality distro-neutral learning, the practical
'costs' of switching away from an unsatisfactory provider are high and
the certainty of achieving desired benefits is low, i.e. lock-in is the
OSS norm.

Not surprisingly, the commercial distros tend to be better than
voluntary ones at providing easy learning paths and hence increasing the
cost of migration.

Please don't misunderstand this last point (John?). It's the
non-commercial suppliers that I'm criticising, here.  

They are the ones with a real material interest in lowering the cost of
migration, by helping to develop a distro-neutral learning environment
.. yet they are signally failing to do so.

The LPD is stuffed full of HOWTOs and tutorials that are so out of date
that some are positively misleading.  The quantity (and sometimes the
quality) of output from the Debian documentation project has been
pathetic (even if there are slight signs of revival in recent months).

Ubuntu has generated an amazing number of recipe-style HOWTOs in its
short life, but the vast majority are extremely brief and
particularistic, i.e. you overcome a specific obstacle, but you are not
always sure of the underlying principles being applied.  

At first glance, I'm rather impressed by the unusually coherent and
well-prioritised nature of Gentoo's documentation effort. Unfortunately
the few guides that I've read there tend towards a "do this, then do
this, then do this" style of approach, i.e. much of what you learn can
be pretty useless if you don't have the Gentoo toolchain available.

... OK, rant over.

Dave