University, and network config on RH9

> Familiarizing students with an environment that they are highly likely
> to encounter (and upon which their employability may depend) in the real
> world is beneficial to the students -- and to their future employers.

It also leads to a spiral which strongly benefits the supplier.
Suppliers know this all too well, and do their best to get their
products taught. Perhaps the university in question is following the
normal "politically correct" pattern of the age, and applying positive
discrimination!

The spiral is "Use Microsoft because people are taught it at school",
combined with "Teach Microsoft because people expect it". In the UK,
I expect most if not all schooling below age 18 is done on Microsoft,
and I doubt I could take the so called "European Computer Driving License"
and similar courses with knowledge of Linux alone. Perhaps the university
rightly assumes that its students already have enough Microsoft exposure.

Back on topic - a Linux gripe. Tried a Red Hat 9 box yesterday. Wanted
to put it on the network. Didn't find /etc/network like on Debian,
tried the GUI. It is assumed (like Microsoft used to) that the reason
you're connecting to a network is to get Internet Access, so you have
to use the Internet Connection Wizard to create a new interface. I did
not see a way of doing this in the Interfaces tool. I selected DHCP and
it nicely found me a DHCP address, but I had to use ifconfig to find
it. It would be nice if the IP address showed itself greyed out in the
manual IP fields in the config dialog when one is assigned.

 - Richard

-- 
   _/_/_/  _/_/_/  _/_/_/ Richard dot Corfield    at    ntlworld dot com
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 _/_/      _/    _/       apples a year.
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