[OpenIndiana-discuss] Graphical Desktop environment on server

[Richard L. Hamilton]

All well and good for most of the time when things are mostly working.  For the rest of the time, best to know how to use vi or even ex/ed, what all the editable file formats are and do, etc.

Unless of course you have reliable tested backups frequent enough that reloading and restoring from backup is an acceptable solution. :-)  Because without the skills to dig deep, you’ll never know what really went wrong, and you’ll be reduced to the non-diagnostic Windows approach: reboot, reformat, reload.

PS yes, vi is a PITA to learn, (I had to learn vi decades ago having previously used early incarnations of the much friendlier Rand Editor), but as a general purpose editor, once you _have_ learned it, you can work faster with it than with most others.  Having used way too many different editors, the only things it lacks are truly scriptable extensability (use emacs if you can’t live without that) and “folding” (hiding uninteresting lines) like the mainframe ISPF editor (have yet to find something as handy for that on Unix, although there’s a free sort-of clone that may be tolerable (works on Linux, haven’t yet tried to compile for Solaris or OS X).

On Dec 27, 2014, at 10:33 AM, Nikola M. <minikola at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12/27/14 04:20 AM, Jim Klimov wrote:
>> 26 декабря 2014 г. 13:24:45 CET, Dmitry Kozhinov <dima at desktopfay.com> пишет:
>>> 
>>> Look, even experienced UNIX admin has difficulties with command line
>>> (not to offend anyone).
>>> Force me to edit config files with vi instead of gedit, and I will go
>>> looking for a different job. I believe that new generation of system
>>> administrators cannot afford spending half of their lives learning that
>>> 
>>> command line magic spells. This is why OI is popular, and Illumian is
>>> not. This is why Linux is popular (it would not if had no GUI at all).
>>> And this is why Oracle Solaris has GUI.
>>> 
>>> I understand that there are headless servers and datacenters, but this
>>> is different topic.
>> Use midnight commander editor then ;)
>> Text mode (x11 terminal interaction supported, but not required) and reasonably intuitive interface ;)
>> As for X11 on the server, remember that in terms of resources it eats precious ram (well maybe not so precious in modern machines), and in terms of security it is an additional attack surface.
> 
> Yeah one can just disable gdm service and be done with it, no harm done if Desktop environment is present.
>> It makes sense to start it, if needed, on a need-to-use basis and then turn off.
>> For me X, especially with vnc, is primarily a way to run many terminals on one display and not lose terminal sessions and whatever diagnostic loops might be running there when i am breaking the network settings, or working remotely and with long-running tasks which i don't want to lose when ssh or vpn breaks, or when my laptop goes to sleep as i ride home while the server keeps doing some work, etc.
> 
> You can also use 'screen' for that. It does not require X and you can reconnect to it with screen -r on next connection. (you dont' have to keep connection to server)
> Also windows and appl won't die if X server dies or is killed
> Tried loop-back X server, Xvnc to have apps that do not talk to graphical hardware at all?
>> Though this year i became more of a full-time desktop hipster user (programming and browsing with a gui ide at work), so yes it is useful quite a bit ;)
> 
> If you ask me, server without GUI is not a server, looking from smaller companies perspective. If nothing else,  it helps pointing uneducated customers over phone to do something if needed. And some things are done faster on graphical console. So yes.
> 
> 
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