On 8/2/07, Andrej Ricnik-Bay <andrej.groups@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/3/07, Merlin Moncure <mmoncure@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > they do, but experience has shown it is prudent to be able to
> > administrate the hardware directly from the box.
>
> I'm curious: which aspect of hardware administration
> on a Linux box would require X (to be running)? If I *really*
> needed applet such-and-such I could still run it easily, with
> less overhead and w/o the X server even being installed on
> the big iron from my desktop ...
>
> ssh -X user@server whizbangGUItool
>
[...]
> Cheers,
> Andrej
There is of course no *requirement* for this to be the case, but one
must make concessions for the fact that not everyone is at the same
level of administration. To make Linux more accessible, a GUI is
added for those people. Those people are just as smart and equally
talented, but simply may not have the time to learn every command line
detail to get a server up.
While I agree that one can also use ssh and a remote X display (and is
personally how I would do it, if not just pure command line), it is
not that much of a stretch to understand that someone else's
circumstances may not allow this without more additional setup which
requires more time.
Also, while the usual runlevel for a system would be 3, keeping a
system at runlevel 5 would not realistically use more resources. When
the system starts up, it will load the X server and xdm only (not
gnome or anything else until someone logs in), and when not used all
of that will get paged out to disk, so all it is taking up is a
fraction of the CPU to make the login cursor blink. Any default
screensaver will basically just blank the screen.