@Videonauth I think that is just NAA. The question asks for a way to automatically edit what Samba shares are available for mounting without editing /etc/fstab. The answer says to manually edit /etc/fstab with nano, so it's not answering the question that was asked, at all. it doesn't even say what changes to make. I have flagged that NAA. Is that separate from the one you flagged? Do you have any reason to think it isn't NAA?
I don't think the GUI vs. command-line issue is the problem; for example, in this question on another site, I asked for GUI solutions, and some of the answers are with the command-line anyway, which is fine, because they are just interpreting my question more broadly to fit the needs of more readers.
In the case of that fstab question, though, an answer saying how to open /etc/fstab with nano doesn't answer it, nor does it answer any generalization of it, nor any question remotely similar to it.
@eliah I have no reason to think it is not NAA, i just want to act on it because of my bias, the answerer wrote a big answer comment on my first comment where i just wrote "Please doe re-read the question"
which caused me to flag his comment-answer naa and write a second comment
and actually if it was for me to decide this answer would be deleted already
and since this bias i wont act on it and let others decide this
@FaheemMitha I don't know about that. Other OSes have their shortcomings, after all. I don't much like the notion that *nix systems are only for people who enjoy learning and using technical skills to perform everyday computing tasks. Also, personally I have found shares-admin useful in simple cases. Hmm... maybe I should post an answer about that. Actually, no -- I don't think shares-admin actually configures smbmount/mount.cifs.
I have also downvoted it. Are you saying unrelated content is kept as answers on Unix & Linux? So if someone asks one question, and someone else comes along and answers an entirely different question, that's not NAA?
The question is asking how to completely avoid manually editing that file. Aside from that, though, the answer is just saying how to open a text file as root in nano; it doesn't actually say what to do with it.
That might be true, and if so then that's bad, but that's not what I am doing here. It is not a bad answer to the question that was asked, or an attempt to answer the question that was asked that fails to do so. It is an attempt to answer a completely different question. You say, "If the issue you face is that you're not root and so can't edit the file, the answer even solves it." But that is completely unrelated to the question. The OP did not mention anything like that at all.
It's one paragraph of chit-chat about their emotional state, and then a question "Is there a way to add say a CIFS samba share to the fstab with a Ubuntu GUI?"
But they clarify what sort of solution they are looking for: "Like Windows' map network path functionality." It's not chit-chat that they don't want to edit fstab directly. It's what the entire question is all about.
I suppose you could argue that an GUI type interface might be useful for validation, but in my experience, most such interfaces are buggy and cause more problems than they solve.
And fstab doesn't exactly have a complex format, anyway.
@MichaelHomer So the part of the question that explicitly says they don't want to edit the file is unimportant because it just represents their emotional state, while their further explicit clarifications that this is what they mean are unimportant because they're commented, and the comparison to a specific GUI in another OS is unimportant because it's just an example? This reasoning seems completely arbitrary, and capable of supporting absolutely any conclusion whatsoever.
Well, it might. You need to write the UNC path (but the slashes are backwards), and specify the authentication mode or credentials in the options, etc.
@EliahKagan There's no part that says they don't want to edit the file; the comment also doesn't say they don't want to edit the file (it says they don't want to copy an existing line); Windows has at least three different map-network-path functionalities. You're inferring a lot that isn't actually there.
I don't have any violent aversion to GUIs or anything, and I sometimes use them for simple repetive tasks - printing, burning DVDs. But they tend to get easily confused when interacting with text files, in my experience.
@MichaelHomer The title says "with a GUI". Nano isn't a GUI.
To be clear, I haven't downvoted or flagged it myself. I actually think one should be using a text editor, as I said already. But I also don't see how it's an answer to the question.
The answer seems to operate on the premise that you're having trouble editing the file because your GUI editors (gedit, etc) don't have root privileges, and it provides an alternative way to make that happen within the GUI.
@FaheemMitha That's very likely what was intended in the question, but all it actually asks is whether there's a way to add a line to fstab from the GUI.
All it has to be is an attempt to answer the question
@MichaelHomer I'm fairly sure what he means is one of those pulldown menu thingies. That's usually what they mean. Like I already said, not the best written question.
@MichaelHomer I'll let someone else figure that one out.
I wonder if any of the existing methods for modifying fstab include any level of validation. That's something that might be useful, but also would be non-trivial. Perhaps impossible.
@FaheemMitha Do you mean sort of like visudo, but for verifying that changes being made to fstab don't cause it to become syntactically incorrect? Or would this go beyond syntax checking?
@EliahKagan Yes, I did have visudo in mind, but to be really useful, it would have to go beyond syntax checking. Which is what I meant by perhaps impossible.
For sudo you really only need to check syntax, and then you're good. But a syntatically correct fstab may still result in a boot failure.
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
UUID=e99a2f32-9120-4c77-96da-42a8dde6e794 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
UUID=2532c426-5e7d-44f1-a8b4-69df83084b66 none swap sw 0 0
well not exactly a dead badger but a slowly really old system, Asus Rampage/Formula I board, Intel q9550 core2duo quadcore, max 8 GB RAM, and a GTX 750 Ti 4 GB
@Videonauth 14 years is a long time. I still have a monitor from 2004, but that's about it. Though my case from that year would probably still be usable. But I left it behind in the United States.
yes it is but what will you do if you're computer-crazy like me and and not being able to afford new hardware every few years, and even for the new hardware im already saving since two year for it, and still have at least another to go
a symptom of out time i guess, its meanwhile pretty uncommon that youngsters here don't go into studying at universities and so companys can choose between young people which have a degree or some old bum woho just is a trained industrial machinist in CNC
wel it gives you more basic knowledge in certain fields, example: informatics you get all the knowledge taught math, programming theory etc which is quite helpful, and thats what companies are looking for
getting a job as a programmer or sysadmin in germany is almost impossible without degree, no matter how enthusiastic you are and how much you know from your almost 39 years of computing hobby
@FaheemMitha true i taught myself about 18 different programming languages over the last 20 years. knowing windows inside out and well i think i find my way around in linux too, even if I'm still not that good at bash tools
my linux stalled only once since im using linux and that was due to a bad driver
using linux now mainly since im on askubuntu (1 year and 8 months)
I thought it would be a nice idea if we could have a question thread where everyone posts an answer where they introduce themselves, talk about themselves a little bit, and tell the community their motivation for participating on this site.
Some SE sites don't have much of a community (in the se...
And often even answered questions are not answered that well. The high rep members generally do a pretty good job, but for low rep members it's more hit and miss.
well unanswered questions, click on tha last page to show up and work em down one by one, check if i can answer it, can it be answered at all (if no mark as unreproducible) or if theyre dupes etc etc
and when i come across one which can be answered i answer it
Not really a good measure, but if it's really terrible it will have a low number of upvotes, or possibly none at all. Or maybe downvotes if anyone bothered to vote.
@FaheemMitha there are those more peculiar/uncommon setups which require quite a bit of research in various documentation for each component. Often enough I've found that google doesn't provide anything specific enough to resemble a working example.
from experience, I'd say its also a good way to find new bugs or un-/badly documented features
I've asked this already, but one more time - I want something that will tell me when mail has arrived in my mailbox. Most of the answers I came across on the net talk about scripting something, but I really just want a preexisting program which I don't have to modify. Is this a solved problem? Should I ask a question?
Your mail client might already show a popup/notification. There are probably some panel applets which can do that too. Or you could write a small script that uses an existing notification library to inform you about new mail.
I use alpine as my primary mail reader. While I spend most of my day in the terminal or emacs, it would still be nice to get pretty notification of new mail using notify-bin. Is there any way I can configure alpine to run a custom command when new mail is recieved?
@FaheemMitha just did, the answer looks pretty good, overall not that complicated at all. Also easy enough to adapt that same solution for about any scripting/programming language should one not like C for some reason.
@FaheemMitha probably enough to use "with open("/tmp/alpine.fifo", "r") as f:" and then read line at time "for line in f" and then call "os.system(["notify-send", "-t", "0", line])" or something like that
@sebasth Thanks for the pointer. Python is certainly easier to work with than C. Though I'd like a solution more easily integrated with Alpine. Though maybe there isn't one.
I use alpine as my primary mail reader. While I spend most of my day in the terminal or emacs, it would still be nice to get pretty notification of new mail using notify-bin. Is there any way I can configure alpine to run a custom command when new mail is recieved?
