Comments on: Don’t Let Users Do Things They Can’t Do

By: Tom Parker

Tom Parker — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:26:50 +0000

Yeah, the modprobe blacklist is one of those “someone needs to write a gui for the common use cases, but no-one’s been bothered enough yet”. To some extent this is because it’s essentially a nasty hack to work around dodgy drivers, but that’s always going to be the case for some drivers.

(FYI, I just filed http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/23776/ which might get something done eventually…)

By: Terence Eden

Terence Eden — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:07:42 +0000

I quite agree – the only problem is the lack of GUIs for essential / low level software.

For example, when installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I was prompted to edit “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf” and then to fiddle around with GRUB or something else equally sensitive to typos.

As an aside, it always amuses me when you run
foo –help
and get
Foo is a program to bar. Valid options are
foo –AGbgvxL

Yeah… great help that! I know, I know, I should add documentation and feed back upwards.

By: Tom Parker

Tom Parker — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:25:48 +0000

“It’s one of my gripes with Linux. If you’re editing a configuration file, you are relying on yourself to sanity check your input – often without knowing what the limits are.”

If you’re editing a configuration file manually (as opposed to using a GUI tool that edits that type of config file – which is usually the best way to mix the Unix paradigm of small text config files plus this issue), then you should really either a) know exactly what you’re doing or b) be staring at the documentation for that file at the same time, otherwise yeah, you’re in for a potential world of pain. Most things these days on a modern Linux system where you’d have a GUI dialog capable of editing that setting on other OSes also have a GUI dialog on Linux.

Also, if a bit of software isn’t sanity checking your input (which config files definitely count as), then it’s a damn fool piece of software which needs a bug filing…