h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was impressed and so I remembered it

phw, if you're really interested in how a Linux (or similar system) hangs together then try http://www.linuxfromscratch.org tells you how to build a system from a host with a target disk, compiling everything (GCC included)...If you've got the time

Impressed?
Anyway, thanks for the link. I just knew the HowTo.
Time, yeah, that's the problem.
BTW, you know the what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here-syndrom?
It goes like this:
You want to install/change a minor thing. (Well, that's what _you_ think...)
After reading README (and INSTALL), you realize, that the system misses some library.
You look for the library on the web and get the RPM. (Slackware users skip this step )
You try to install it and it just won't work, because about ten .so files are not there.
You try to get them and fail.
You decide to do a rm -rf /usr/local/src/blabla/.
You get the source and try to compile it.
Now you get about one hundred error messages. None of them make any sense to you.
You realize, that you got a bit excited and forgot to read the instruction for the installation.
You do it now.
You are informed that in order to install the library, you have to upgrade your glibc.
You download the latest version.
You wait a long time...
You read the README and the INSTALL files.
You give up when you realize the sheer size of both files and their satanic obscurity.
Its now 4 am (always!).
You decide to do a su -c "rm -rf /"
Fortunately, you fall asleep before you can enter the password.
When you wake up, the next morning, you've no idea, what the zark it was, you wanted to install.

Though, the good thing is, that you _really_ think before you decide to install new software.

geting back to the theme of this thread, the real advantage of command line tools over exclusively GUI tools is that they allow you to "think out of the box", rather than having to do what the designer originally intended. You also have the option of calling them from anywhere, so you can do remote config's over telnet, set up scripts to do common tasks easily, or call them from your own programs (which can be a gui front end to the tool).
If you choose to have tools run from a gui, make them front ends running command line tools. This seperates out the functionality and the interface, so that both can be improved independantly of the other, thus conforming to the unix idea of lots of small tools that output to other small tools.
Another thing that the gui lovers forget, is that it is notoriously hard to get X windows running. Until you have, you can't use any of the "nice, neat, idiot freindly" tools that they love so much.
As regards to the security of linux, the situation is not that it is inherently secure, but that (unlike windows in all it's forms) it is possible to make it so that it is incredibly secure. This is done by turning off deamons that you don't use, using ssh rather than rsh for remote logins, and generally removing any user access that is not secure. you also have the ability to use older hardware, when the program crashes it doesn't take everything with it (usually), and you can set up an old 486 as the interface to the world, and make ALL access via that machine be allowed less permissions than those inside your firewall. You are also less prone to viruses due to the fact that most people don't use exactly the same programs as everyone else, and even when two people do use the same programs, most of the security holes that hackers and virus writers use are not avalable in most of the programs.
Linux also has the advantage of not charging per machine, not having obsolecence built in, and lacks various other problems symptomatic of being written by a certain company in redmond, usa.
note: redmond linux is not owned by microsoft, but corel now is.