|Forum|Articles|The Desert of the *NIX By Anubis   The Desert of the *NIX July 19 2001 at 1:11 PM Anubis Well after having gone through a few Unix classes I think I have enough fodder to make a post about them. The textbook sucks worse than anything Hoover could make. One of the first things we had to do in the class was log on as root and make usernames for all the people in our "group". Nowhere in the 300+ pages of the textbook is the command to add a new user mentioned, though we looked for over an hour. Once we got the correct command from the teacher we could not get it to work. He could not even get it to work. Ultimately we had to reinstall the operating system. The class is a group class and on top of that it is a journal class and on top of that you have to sign out a hard drive. If I wanted this I would have signed up for an english class. I thought with one of the three people in the group signing for the drive and the other doing the journal, I was free to be the groups slacker, a skill I had already honed in Fosters electronics "class". I was deluded. With one guarding the drive and the other writing the journal where did that leave me? In the middle playing keyboard monkey and typing all the commands in. My hands hurt. Everyone is saying that *nix is the future. Well if this is the future I think I would rather live in the past. I mean Unix makes DOS look like cutting edge drek and that is saying somthing since they are both white text on a black screen. If I wanted this nostalga trip I would whip out my old Kaypro and boot up CP/M. At least when I needed to get actual work done I could put the Kaypro back on the shelf and use somthing that was written in the 80's. I try to steer clear of operating systems where the curve of cutting edge to average joe is not higher than my current age The X-windows enviroment avilable was Gnome. It at least made the system look half-modren but the default resolution was somthing ridiculous like 2000 pixels across. The onscreen text was so small that we needed access to powerful microscopes to see it. The teacher warned us that choosing different resolutions could cause the monitor to catch fire. He actually said "catch fire" So we could either use the command line and get capral or use the GUI and go blind... I am telling you this OS is not winning me over in the user experience department.       Syntax Error/:|Forum|Articles|