Our best foot forward

[Patrick]

Hi Everyone

This is my first post here.

It seems to me that me that if an administration job needs to get done 
there are pretty much two ways of going about it:

With GUI assistance, i.e Synaptic
or
Through the Command line with possible manual editing of configuration 
files.


Synaptic and it's counterparts are great but surely they must take some 
time to  write and risk losing the options available at the command line.

The CLI is great but with power comes complexity. So my suggestion is a 
halfway point between the "hand-holding" of the GUI and the sometimes 
confusing world of the CLI.

I / We could write a series of tutorial/helper scripts to guide people 
quicker and get the job done faster.

For instance I just set up an NFS server. A hybrid script-tutorial 
something like what I wrote below might provide quick guidance with less 
typing.

#!/bin/bash

echo "we need to do such and such, here are some options to try, blah, 
blah, blah etc"

sudo gedit /etc/exports

echo "okay now we need to do this because blah blah"

sudo exportfs -ra

sudo /etc/init.d/portmap restart

sudo /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart



There must be lots of people out there that don't have any trouble 
reading, copying, pasting and changing permission with scripts (or could 
learn to do so quickly) but are pressed for time and have only 10 
minutes to set up something like an NFS server. A script that suggested 
a popular set up but that did not enforce it and allowed for 
customization would give everyone the best of both worlds. Would this 
not save time and most importantly make Ubuntu more marketable?

Please let me know what you think-Patrick