Quick poll

[Brad De Vries]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 10:37 AM, David A. Bandel <david.bandel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1.  How many of you run servers (vice desktops)?

Count me as 1.

> 2.  How many servers? (1, 2-10, more than 10)?

Again, 1.

> 3.  How many are headless?

I'm going to say 0.5 because it's on a KVM switch and I sometimes have
a second machine I'm configuring.

> 4.  How many run X (headless or not)?

Count this as 0.

> 5.  How did you install them?

Graphical, I think.  It's been a while, Fedora Core 6..

> 6.  Did you d/l all the CDs/DVD.  If so, what percentage of programs did you install?

I did d/l the CDs but I installed the system via the local network
using either FTP or HTTP.  If you're asking how many of the installed
programs I installed, then 100%.  If you're asking how many of the
available programs did I install, I have no idea.  When I run "rpm -qa
| wc -l", I get 748.

> What I'm looking at here is how odd am I?

I don't have enough data to answer this at this time.

> I'm afraid I fail to see the sense behind installing servers with X.

Are you saying installing X on a server or using X during the installation?

In my opinion, which is what you're looking for in this poll, using X
during an installation, graphical install, is fine.  I do think,
however, that it should be a choice.  For those of us that want to use
a graphical installation, we should have that option.  For those that
don't, a character option should be available as well.

As for installing X on a server, I would say that should be an option
as well.  It's my server, if I want X installed, I'm going to install
X.  If I want apache or KDE or GIMP, I'm going to install them too.
Basically, I'm going to install whatever I want/need.  I guess my
question to you is why trying to make sense of what I install on my
server that sits in my basement of my house and serves my needs?  To
that end, you don't know my needs and are, therefore, not equipped to
make sense of what I've done.

> I also see little sense in burning a DVD just to throw it away after 1
> install and d/l a newer one 2 weeks later for another install.

I agree entirely.  I'm too cheap to "waste" a CD/DVD for a one time
install and I really hate that Fedora requires many (or at least it
used to, I haven't checked recently.)

> Perhaps there are just too many who've started their training on M$
> and can't deal with non-graphical, non-local installs.

That's certainly a possibility.  Another possibility is that people
prefer a graphical install.

> I'm trying to wrap my head around this thinking process but it's not
> making sense.

I wish the the best in this endeavor.  Be prepared that it could take
years to fully understand what people do or don't do.  In fact, there
are people that spend their lives trying to understand people, see
Psychology and Sociology.

> Perhaps if a few of you would answer the poll above, I
> could understand better where the rest of the admins are.

Maybe an analogy would be helpful.  If you were a manufacturer of
candy bars and you made exactly one type of candy bar, let say a
peanut butter wafer dipped in milk chocolate.  You simply could not
sell that one type of candy bar to every person in the world because,
no matter how much you try to convince people that this is the best
candy bar ever, some people will simply not like it.  The point is not
that a server's installation and setup are not like this fictional
candy bar but rather that people have different tastes, wants, needs,
and desires.

I hope my thoughts were helpful to you and others.

Brad.