To GUI or not to GUI?
 

Hi everyone,

I setup a box here that was intended for web-serving some apps. I originally setup the box with no gui - all command line editing. I've found a couple nice GUI utilities i'd like to have - but not sure if it's worth the performance hit of having a running GUI. Actually i'm not sure if there's much of a performance hit at all running a GUI. This is my first successful setup of a linux box so i'm a little hesitant going and possibly messing thing up w/ the GUI.

Any insight?

Thanks,

- rj

Well it wouldn't hurt to install the GUI stuff (providing you have the disk space) and only running it when you wanted it. There is no reason that you have to leave x and everything else running if you aren't using it. But there is also no reason not to install it so you can run it when you want to do configurations, if you think it'll make configuring your server easier.

If you have another machine you use as a desktop setup, which runs an X server, then you can run X apps on your webserver and display them onto another machine. You just need some x clients and client libraries on the webserver, but you don't need an X server on it.

This way of doing things will incur a bit of network overhead, but it's usually rather small. Plus you'll want to learn how to forward X11 over ssh IMO.

On the other hand, there's very little CPU hit from just running an X server on the box. It does take up a bit of memory and disk space though.

I just thought having the GUI might help with monitoring things ya know. It's nice to have some sort of graphic translation of all the statistics. I've got 160gb of storage for this machine that probably won't use anymore then 40 gigs so i'm fine there. So next question is - what's the proper way to go about installing the GUI?

Thanks

In my opinion:

Never a GUI for a server. CLI is all you need :)

GUI wastes resources......and you shouldn't be running reporting/statistics stuff on webserver. Run it on another box that attaches to the server.

I used to have a Redhat 7.3 webserver. No GUI. In fact, it was the best non-GUI box I've ever used....still to this day. It was a Pentium Pro 180 Compaq Prosignia. :)

Peace,
Whitehat

i agree, a gui is unnecessary for a server box, especially a web server. it's better to learn how to do things through cli anyway.