FC4->FC5 upgrade options -- and GUIs

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2006-03-11 at 12:09 -0500, Beartooth wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:03:35 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> [....]
> > but your question was...how can I be so dogmatic? The answer is
> > experience. I can repair the issues that crop up from upgrades better
> > than perhaps 60% of the users on this list. But I would say that perhaps
> > as much as 20 - 30% are not capable of dealing with anything but the GUI
>                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > and they shouldn't be doing upgrades. Unless you are willing to get down
>   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 
> > to cli, and suffer through the issues, it's not recommended in my book.
> 
> Having no idea off the top of my head what cli might be (I could look,
> fwiw, and will), I guess that makes me part of the 20 - 30% -- and glad to
> hear there are so many of us.
> 
> At any rate, that was far and away the plainest most useful form of the
> answer, to the likes of me or us, that I've yet seen. Thank you, SIR,
> bounteously, for putting it in those terms!
> 
> And lest there be any doubt, I mean every word exactly as written. Knowing
> about irony is part of the professional competence I do have, and there is
> none in what I said above. I love and prefer the command line, when I know
> enough or somebody tells me; otherwise, that GUI is Sine Qua Non Number
> One, especially while learning. I say again, with feeling, THANK YOU.
----
cli = command line interface

recognize that the fundamental architecture of UNIX/Linux is 'C'
language and text configuration files. Knowing where the configuration
files are located and how to use an appropriate text editor is the key.

GUI = graphic user interface

recognize that the GUI tools that are available merely manipulate the
same text configuration files in the same locations...they just provide
the knowledge of where these files are and the GUI editor to edit them.

If you can function in command line, you can probably boot into single
user mode and fix about anything. If you require the GUI, then you have
to be able to boot into GUI mode to fix something. That issue was on
FC-4 as one of the updates updated some xorg stuff that broke run level
5 (GUI) on many people's hardware and they had to actually get to
command line as root (probably run level 3) and run
'system-config-display --reconfig' to fix things.

Craig