GUI for sysadmin?

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Nick Levinson

Newbie here. For my next OS, I want FreeBSD, but I also want a GUI, including for most system administration. I can do CLI stuff but would rather not, because it's not often and then I'd have to relearn it for each task and thus be slowed. I've seen writeups to the effect that admin has little graphical support, but that may have been about older FreeBSD. I don't mind doing a two-step installation (OS then GUI). Mostly I do office productivity (text/word processing, GIMP, surf the Web, etc.) on my laptop. Will I be okay with present-day stable FreeBSD?
 
Office productivity, GIMP, and web, work well in a GUI. I use KDE which has all the administration stuff you'd want. I'm wondering though, when you say "system administration" that sounds more like servers where a GUI is not that helpful. So, what is it that you'd like to administer?
 
My own system. Almost nothing I do entails my serving, but I want control over my system, including if a problem I might have prevents access to the Internet and its informational resources for solving problems (I probably won't have another computer handy for researching in parallel to problem-solving), so a GUI is helpful, because I can see the full menus rather than have to remember what to type (I've used info and man but doing so slows me down a lot). I gather that the main reason admins prefer a CLI over a GUI is that a knowledgeable admin can work much faster in a CLI, so perhaps a GUI has not been developed much for internal administration. I'm geeky enough to recognize that almost no problem that I encounter is random but that most of them have causes I can probably solve, so I do my own sysadmin. KDE on Linux has a lot of sysadmin settings, maybe more than Gnome offers, but I didn't know if KDE offers most of the settings that FreeBSD would offer in its command-line interface. Would KDE be what I need? If so, can I use the latest KDE (I saw an issue about preferring less-recent Gnome over Gnome 3 on FreeBSD but maybe that's different)?
 
Nick Levinson said:
I gather that the main reason admins prefer a CLI over a GUI is that a knowledgeable admin can work much faster in a CLI, so perhaps a GUI has not been developed much for internal administration.
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I don't think it's basically speed, though that probably does relate. The thing is that a GUI would have to be extremely large and complicated to be really effective. It's really an intervening layer, like typing with stilts. Why not just edit files directly?

An a non-professional, what I do is make notes and then cut and paste for more complicated things. That saves me the huge trouble that Windows people go through with their nested, nested, nested, menues which are difficult to explain in words and impossible to sort through without considerable expertise.

To me the bottom line is I find that people will offer methods and solutions in words (which you can save in a text file) rather than using long series of pictures which are difficult to file and search.
 
Nick Levinson: I think you might have missed OJ's point. "Administration" usually refers to a specific set of activities--configuring system services, formatting disk partitions, configuring networking, managing software, etc. Typical desktop work and web browsing are not "administrative" tasks. There is not graphical tool that will let you administer a FreeBSD system, no. Most things are configured by editing text files, and you can certainly do that using a graphical text editor. But starting daemons, partitioning and formatting disks, installing ports or packages, etc. is done from the command line. To be blunt: FreeBSD isn't Ubuntu. It's basically the opposite of that.

As for desktop work, most of the typical things you'd use on a Linux desktop (Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP, and others) are available on FreeBSD.
 
Oh, and yes KDE has issues. It always has and always will. I haven't found anything to replace it though, unless it's to go minimal and use Fluxbox, which I would also recommend. I never could come to terms with Gnome and find it too difficult to bend to my taste. And that's really what choice of GUI is about - personal taste. Although KDE does do a lot of stuff with menus, but not so much when it comes to system administration.
 
Actually, I did understand about kinds of admin, and you itemized some of what I had in mind. I can edit files directly, but usually I have to learn some language-like constructs and substantive specifications, and I wouldn't do it often, so time on the learning curve wouldn't get much recouped. I do use text editors rather than word processors unless I want embedded formats etc.; probably most config files should not be edited in a word processor.

A GUI is large and complex but modern hard drives are measured in GBs, not MBs, and I had no space problem with Fedora or OpenSuse Linuxes with multiple desktop environments loaded. I have not found going through a GUI to be more complex than using a CLI. I didn't have the problem with menu systems you describe; describing is easy with structures like "Edit > Preferences > Privacy" and I often just read through the menus to figure out how to do something, i.e, I'd hack without much risk; for example, by convention a menu item ending with "..." means a dialog will come, so selecting the menu item does not commit you to a course. It wouldn't stop you from commanding "rm *.*" but neither would a CLI. Most icons are accompanied by text (my experience was heaviest with Mac System 6 and then Win 95a/98SE until switching to Linux about 2 years ago), so if you ran into icon-drenched OSes requiring manuals to understand that's the opposite of what pro-icon designers were originally trying to do. I can usually translate phrased advice into steps in a GUI or a CLI, but carrying it out in a GUI is easier if it's only occasional.

I stopped using Ubuntu as it seemed too weak on security, although good on friendliness.

KDE's main issue in my experience was its slowness relative to Gnome, probably due to having many more settings, so that execution required the OS to read more files, but since my main work is productivity in apps I probably am not much affected by KDE's tardiness as a percentage of a day. Gnome 3's lack of a main menu is annoying.

I appreciate this discussion. I think I'll look more closely at PC-BSD or OpenBSD.
 
Nick Levinson said:
KDE's main issue in my experience was its slowness relative to Gnome
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There shouldn't be any "slowness" in KDE. Things should be essentially instant to your eyes. If you're seeing a problem then your computer may not have enough resources. KDE doesn't require much memory. I have a lowly 8GB and I hardly ever see even half of that used, and that's mostly Firefox. I did get an image rendering speedup from changing my video card to a vaguely contemporary one.
 
Nick Levinson said:
Newbie here. For my next OS, I want FreeBSD, but I also want a GUI, including for most system administration. I can do CLI stuff but would rather not, because it's not often and then I'd have to relearn it for each task and thus be slowed. ...
Click to expand...
Nick, I am a Level III Unix/Linux Administrator for a regional ISP in my day job. What I do on the servers I manage is install mc(1) and, as root, use its two pane ncurses(3) "GUI" to navigate and copy|edit files from the CLI. I set the editor to vi(1), but the internal editor works okay too and may be easier for novice administrators. I also save backup copies of each system's config files, such as /etc/rc.conf, /boot/loader.conf, /etc/pf.conf, and so on before I make new edits. It is easy to copy these to a subdirectory, network storage, or an attached flash drive using mc(1). As long as I can get to the command line I can get my system back to a previous state by copying the backup files over any recent edits. It is not difficult to use the CLI to manage one's system with a helper like mc(1) installed.

Frankly, when the GUI breaks it is necessary to know how to manage one's system from the CLI to recover said GUI. I have seen updates break X on desktop Linux where all one got after reboot was a login prompt. Knowing what to do then is pretty important. Having mc(1) installed can be very useful in that situation.

For the record, my preferred GUI is Xfce. :)
 
I'll look into adding mc and ncurses and maybe vi (a bunch of editors are out there and I'm comfortable with plain text editors), backing up before editing is a common procedure, and I agree on not being a blank moron when needing a CLI or when anything breaks (I don't assume anything's bullet-proof). I also have my machine defaulting to booting from a removable disc (if inserted) and access the hard drive that way if needed. When an old Fedora Linux (v15? 10? 16?) shipped with root GUI disabled and enablement unsupported, I and probably many others re-enabled it and it now (at least as of v20) ships enabled. At the moment I have no GUI I really like on Linux (I'm almost sure it has Xfce) but I'll probably try all the ones that ship with PC-BSD when I install that, probably in a couple of months.

KDE: It was slow but I don't remember on which platform I usually used it. It might have been my now-gone 32MB RAM box; that's the smallest RAM on which I ran Linux. I ran Gnome on the same platforms where I ran KDE and KDE was usually slower and someone else reported a similar experience elsewhere, but maybe modern platforms make that unnoticeable. And, at any rate, slowness was only when using the desktop stuff, not when doing productivity. The days when I could type too fast and get jammed were the days I used manual typewriters and watched the keys jam en route to the ribbon. Once I became decent enough at creative writing while using a CPU, those days went. I'm willing to try KDE again.

"PC-BDS" was a typo before I corrected the transposition.

Looks like I won't go with OpenBSD.

Thanks, this has been very useful. I'll probably buy a spare laptop in a month or two and lay BSD down then.
 
Just my 2 cents about backing up config files. I use revision control system that is part of base system ( ci, co...) and it suits this kind of need pretty well. It's pretty easy to even create system from fresh install of FreeBSD by just recovering RCS files from backups and restoring latest revisions (or some previous if that is needed).
 
Kiiski said:
Just my 2 cents about backing up config files. I use revision control system that is part of base system ( ci, co...) and it suits this kind of need pretty well. It's pretty easy to even create system from fresh install of FreeBSD by just recovering RCS files from backups and restoring latest revisions (or some previous if that is needed).
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Using version control systems for config files border line unnecessary if you are using ZFS or HAMMER. Namely in particularly the second one has built in fine grained file history. HAMMER history combined with slider can be used to give spectacular results.

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/docs/howtos/howtoslide/

The only "missing" part is the log file from a version control systems.
ZFS is a bit more awkward as you have to schedule frequent snapshots (snapshots also exist on HAMMER but they are largely used as a tool to prune excessive matadata)
 
Nick Levinson said:
I'll look into adding mc and ncurses and maybe vi (a bunch of editors are out there and I'm comfortable with plain text editors)...
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Well, you'd only have to add misc/mc. vi(8) and ncurses() are included in the FreeBSD base system, and are installed by default on almost every major Linux distribution, as well as OS X. vi has been a staple of Unix systems for forty years. ;)
 
I thought I recognized ncurses and vi, I've tried my hand at Emacs (not just for Eliza), vi, and I think vim, and I found each one had to be learned when I already knew text editors, like gedit, and on Mac SE I used to prefer TeachText over Word 4.01. I've got a 1.8MB file I maintain in gedit or whatever text editor is handy. As long as PC-BSD has something, I'll be fine. Except when I'm more or less yelling at the computer, but that's different.
 
ANOKNUSA said:
Well, you'd only have to add misc/mc. vi(8) and ncurses() are included in the FreeBSD base system, and are installed by default on almost every major Linux distribution, as well as OS X. vi has been a staple of Unix systems for forty years. ;)
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I don't want to sound nit-picky but Linux doesn't include vi. Most Linux distro used to include vim which is very different than vi. Recently I noticed that default ubuntu editor is nano. IIRC FreeBSD just like Open includes the last free version of nvi 1.79. The latest 2.1.3 nvi a.k.a. nvi2 is in Open ports tree. I see that FreeBSD has package nvi-1.81 which the last pre nvi2 for version.
To make matter worse recently PC-BSD was shipped with the very unpleasant alias vi="vim" and it was even defaulting to nano for crontab editing. Solaris has what would be the closest thing to real vi. I think it should be available as a part of Heirloom project.
 
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