Re: Text-based system
90-95% of my administration at work is done without a GUI across several blends and breeds of UNIX and Linux. Solaris 8, 9, and 10, IRIX, RHEL3, RHEL4, HP/UX etc etc.. Heck, even some of my very best windows tools were commandline scripts I wrote to make registry changes to over 700 machines at the same time with a little for/do logic. (do not attempt this with a workstation version of a Microsoft OS!)
For UNIX/Linux, the biggest godsend to console administration is a command called screen. I have screen configured with a .screenrc settings file that lets me very easily open several terminals within a terminal, label them, detach them with whatever program I was running in it still running, and reattach to them whenever I want with simplified hotkeys, and a session reattach script that lets me list my named sessions and attach to them in whichever sequence I want. That enables multitasking without a GUI. Then between wget, scp, vim, pico, cpio, iostat, sar, some nice broad environment variables, and some quick aliases to keep the keystrokes down, a powerful shell like tcsh or zsh, and a little bit of scipting knowledge, the only time I ever need a GUI is to troubleshoot a GUI application a user is having a problem with.
If you've never heard of, or used screen before, read its man page in ubuntu or whatever flavor you're running. Once you start playing with it, you'll really dig it. You can even set it up so that other people can connect to your 'screen' session in view only mode or interactive mode (if you are trying to show someone how to do something, for example)
Last edited by toupeiro; August 1st, 2007 at 07:49 AM.
"Its easy to come up with new ideas, the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date." -Roger von Oech
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