Hans ... There is the LSB (Linux Standard Base). There are a lot of things specified in that. Not sure if 'netconfig' is in that lot of things or not.
The major distributions existed before LSB. In absense of a standard, and for lack of such tools from the greater Linux community, the distributions hacked their own tools for doing these things (like network configuration). And yeah ... they made assumptions. I'm not trying to justify any lack from SuSE/Novell, just trying to give some background. The underlying tools are the commands 'ifconfig' and 'route', and not much else. Scripts are written around those to get things set properly. As for 3270, full screen 3270 could have been supported from the earliest. (Well, as soon as we had the driver contributed by UTSGlobal! Thanks, folks!) No reason why block full-screen I/O cannot be handled by the tools we get from the distributors, even YaST. -- R;
