There is nothing more guaranteed to ignite a bad tempered, incandescent flame war that an outbreak of hostilities between the rival Gnome and KDE camps. Well, except perhaps a slanging match between the champions of the GUI and the command line. Enter stage left the compromise candidate which might just unite the warring factions: Hotwire.
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Computer working environments are pretty similar to the species on this planet. One can see ancient species, that have survived millions of years, living along some fairly-recent ones like humans.

I am not a text mode Luddite. I use a graphical user interface (GUI) every day. However, for certain tasks a GUI is just not the best choice.

ufw, the Uncomplicated FireWall, is Ubuntu’s user-friendly, command line frontend to IPTables, the command line utility for managing Netfilter, the firewall application built into the Linux kernel. It is installed not just on Ubuntu, but also on all Ubuntu-based distributions. As simple to use as ufw is, a graphical interface is even better, especially for new users.

Today’s “Newbie Tip” is learning some basics about the “Command Line Interface” or as it’s mostly referred to, “Command Line”. The command line gives the user the ability to interact with the operating system by typing via a text terminal.

Like all Linux distributions, Ubuntu 10.10, aka, Maverick Meerkat, the latest version of the popular Linux distribution, ships with a firewall installed. The firewall is actually embedded in the kernel. In Ubuntu, the firewall’s original command line interface has been replaced by ufw, a more user-friendly command line script.

Translating a command line tool to a graphical interface usually means a loss of functionality. However, in the case of the newly released trowser text browser, while I wouldn't swear that the transition has retained all the functionality of the less command that it is intended to replace, I doubt that anyone short of an expert is likely to notice the difference

Now it’s time to discuss one of the most mysterious and confusing parts of Linux to a Windows user: the command line. To most Windows users the prospect of typing in what you want your computer to do is completely foreign and thus intimidating.

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I'm pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not. Zenity creates GUI widgets from a simple command line and can be used from any shell script.