control center in Ubuntu/Kubuntu?

Thu May 5 22:01:16 CDT 2005

Frederik Dannemare dedi ki:
> On Wednesday 04 May 2005 12:18, Donatas wrote:

>> Are there any plans in Ubuntu/Kubuntu of creating a control center
>> for hardware tuning, something like Mandrake Control Center?
>>
>> Would you think this would be needed? I would strongly encourage
>> that.
> 
> For those of us not too familiar with Mandrake's Control Center what
> does it offer for handling hardware devices?
> 
> KDE Control Control can already set up these:
>  - network interfaces (including wireless)
>  - printers
>  - display
>  - digicams
>  - mouse/keyboard/joystick
> 
> What's missing then? Sound device configuration maybe?

Once upon a time I had listed drakconf (Mdk Control Center) menu for some
other distro. I'm pasting it here (long).

================================================================
Here is what's covered by drakconf (of Mandrake 10.1) as a starting point.
Mind you, these are all system-wide settings that need to be done by root.
For instance mouse and keyboard settings are not the same as the ones in
kcontrol. E.g. mouse settings affect X configuration (and depending on the
mouse type, possibly the kernel modules loaded at boot time):

K -> Sytem -> Configuration -> Configure your computer
+ [1] Boot
  - [11] Autologin
  - [12] Boot loader
  - [13] Boot theme
+ [2] Hardware
  - [21] Hardware
  - [22] Monitor
  - [23] Screen resolution
  - [24] TV card
  - [25] Keyboard
  - [26] Mouse
  - [27] Printers
  - [28] Scanners
  - [29] UPS
+ [3] Mount Points
  - [31] Partitions
  - [32] CD/DVD
  - [33] Floppy drive
  - [34] NFS mount points
  - [35] Samba mount points
  - [36] WebDAV mount points
  - [37] Local disk sharing
+ [4] Network & Internet
  - [41] New connection
  - [42] Internet access
  - [43] Manage connections
  - [44] Monitor connections
  - [45] Remove a connection
  - [46] Proxy
  - [47] Internet connection sharing
+ [5] Security
  - [51] Level and checks
  - [52] Permissions
  - [53] Firewall
+ [6] System
  - [61] Menus
  - [62] Display manager
  - [63] Services
  - [64] Fonts
  - [65] Date and time
  - [66] Logs
  - [67] Console
  - [68] Users and groups
  - [69] Backups
+ [7] Software Management
  - [71] Install
  - [72] Remove
  - [73] Updates
  - [74] Media manager
+ [8] Online Administration
  - [81] Remote Control (Linux/Unix, Windows)

All in all 43 entries distributed into 8 categories. As we will see below,
they are mostly not great new tools but either the already available ones
or their work-alikes. What makes drakconf great (to new users) is that
they are categorized in tidy way and put into a single place. So, even a
complete clueless new user can figure out how to manage his system. Not
that Mandrake has done it perfect, though. For instance system-wide
language setting is separate from drakconf. There are also several
additional administrative utilities scattered here and there in the main
"System" K-Menu entry, but they can be ignored for the time being. Now
let's see what each of these entries do, and to what they correspond in
Kanotix/Debian:

[11] Autologin: To set up whether to automatically login to KDE as some
user upon boot. Not essential.

[12] Boot loader: Just a GUI front end to lilo/grub config.

[13] Boot theme: Whether you want graphical boot screen, which background
to be shown as splash screen, whether you want it also as a fade
background in FB console sessions. Mere eye-candy.

Sub Total: Only [#12] is essential, and there's already a KDE utility for
this, although I never used it and don't know how successful it is.

[21] Hardware: Basically a kinfocenter-alike with an addition of "Run
config tool" and depending on the hardware, a "Configure module" button,
which provides for entering kernel module parameters. Entry form is not
generic. For each module, only the relevant module parameters are offered.
I don't know whether they're already listed somewhere or Mandrake
home-built a list for each and every device they support. As for the "Run
config tool" button, it does the following depending on the device
selected:
  o Floppy and CD/DVD: A simple GUI dialog to set up fstab parameters. Same
as [32] and [33].
  o HDD: GUI partition editor. Same as [31].
  Videocard: A GUI dialog to change the auto-detected VGA card and monitor
manually, and to set resolution. Also a button to select between graphical
or text UI on boot-up (inittab run level selector). An important feature
is that it includes a "Test" button to test the xorg.conf with actually
running X with it, and asking if alles OK before committing the changes.
  o Sound card: Option to manually change the auto-detected sound card
driver.
  o Ethernet card: Same as [41]
  o Mouse: Same as [26]

[22] Monitor: Dialog to manually change the ddc-detected monitor settings.
  o Custom: To enter hsync and vsync manually.
  o Plug and Play: To sense it at each X start (AFAICS it didn't affect my
xorg.conf, though).
  o Vendor: A huge selection tree of each supported monitor categorized by
their brand. Just a brand <-> hsync/vsync database. Too much of a burden
to keep it updated for its little benefit, IMHO. The database contains
mostly (if not all) the DDC capable monitors which don't need manual
hsync/vsync entry. And it lacks those monitors where this database would
be of value, i.e. the old non-ddc ones.
  o Generic: A list of VESA standard resolution and refresh rates to select
from.

[23] Screen resolution: A dialog to select resolution and depth. With a
pretty monitor picture that shows how it would look like with the selected
resolution.

[24] TV card: Dialog to select TV card settings. Already included, possibly
a better one, in Kanotix. I don't have a TV card so I can't compare them.

[25] Keyboard: Dialog to select keyboard (system-wide default). It affects
both X and VCs.

[26] Mouse: Dialog to change and test the auto-detected mouse (including
wheel test).

[27] Printers: A dialog to define/edit/test CUPS based printers (local and
remote). It's got a huge database of printers/drivers (from other
packages). One fine part of it is that it automatically decides whether a
certain package (be it foomatic, gimp-print or anything related) is
missing and it automatically triggers urpmi (apt-get) to install required
ones. This "auto-install by the way" feature is found in most of drakconf.

[28] Scanners: A dialog with 3 buttons: [Search for new scanners], [Add a
scanner manually], and [Scanner sharing]. It also auto-installs required
but missing packages such as sane.

[29] UPS: Dialog to set up UPS. It doesn't work (it's got such a gaping bug
in shutdown sequence for many versions, that I suspect they never test it.
Otherwise they would know that it doesn't work). For several versions now,
I've hacked their UPS handling in shutdown and set up my UPS manually.

Sub Total: Except [29] they're all needed. Many of them are just tarted up
(and offered as a separate dialog) versions of very basic settings. I
don't know which one, if any, is missing from Debian repositories.

[31] Partitions: Just a QtParted alike.

[32] & [33] CD/DVD & Floppy drive: Very simple dialog to enter;
  o Mount point (a local directory browser provided)
  o Mount options (presented as a checkbox list of all relevant options)
  o FS type (presented as a drop-down menu)

[34] NFS mount points: Basically same as [32/33] with a button to [Search
new servers] that is supposed to work. I guess it queries the mount daemon
of prospective NFS servers, but I don't know how it guesses out which
addresses to query in the first place. Either it should be possible to
send a broadcast query to find out mount daemons (I don't know if nfs
supports this), or it may be walking through all the subnet address range.
Anyway, I had tried it on several occasions but I don't remember it
finding the NFS servers in my LAN. If you already got it in your fstab,
then it shows and allows to change the mount options. But no-thanks, once
I place it manually in the fstab why change it through GUI? All in all, I
regard this dialog as junk.

[35] Samba mount points: Same as [34] but I guess with a better chance of
finding SMB servers (via broadcast query). I don't remember having used
it, though.

[36] WebDAV mount points: I never used it. Tried now, but it starts by
installation attempt of a missing pkg (davfs) so I cancelled it.

[37] Local disk sharing: It says "...will permit users to simply click
'share' in Konqueror or Nautilus". IIRC it doesn't provide for network
sharing, but provides for different users on the same machine sharing a
directory. The /tmp (or some other 777 directory immune to auto-cleaning)
could be used just as well. A dedicated directory (say "/share") coming in
Kanotix by default would be nice (mostly rendering this dialog useless).

Sub Total: A partition editor which Kanotix already got, several fstab
editors which can be reduced to a single dialog/utility, and a disk-share
dialog of doubtful use.

[41] New connection: A GUI dialog walks you through setup of these:
  o Modem
  o ISDN
  o ADSL
  o Cable
  o LAN
  o Wireless
Modem connection rather naively expects you to have a hard-modem.
Nevertheless, it detects soft modems (grep through lspci for certain
strings) and shows you the device identification string from lspci, with
two options: Use this auto-detected modem, or set-up manually. You say
"Hah! It found the thing!" You select the "auto-detected modem". And then
the dialog says "Warning. It's not a supported modem. Please visit
http://linmodems.org/" ... Some humorous guys... LAN (eth card) setup
works as in dpkg-reconfigure with usual questions-answers. I haven't tried
others but I assume they should work except the wireless setup. Even
though I've no wireless card installed I tried it nevertheless and it
offered around 140 different chips to select from (I guess many of them
using the same driver, so actual number of drivers could be much lower).
No ndiswrapper solution offered AFAIK.

[42] Internet access: resolv.conf and hosts parameters and internet
connection testing (perhaps a single packet ping to their home site) and
connection status reporting.

[43] Manage connections: Basically editing of what is defined via [41].

[44] Monitor connections: Graphical equivalent of a console based traffic
monitoring utility (I forgot the name. It's either ntop or some other
utility.) Additionally it's got a Connect/Disconnect button. Also they've
got a sys-tray applet version which consolidates [43] and [44] (thru a 
right-click menu).

[45] Remove a connection: Self explanatory.

[46] Proxy: Accepts two parameters, http and ftp proxy, to be defined as
system-wide proxy settings. Some applications and particularly Mandrake's
internet facing tools (such as urpmi / auto update etc.) uses it.

[47] Internet connection sharing: A single iptables masquerading rule
tarted up as a complete dialog. Well, it also installs and sets up
dhcp-server BTW.

Sub Total: Only [41] is of real importance, which is already provided in
Kanotix. Others are nice to have re-touches which should have alternatives
already. (Mostly fancified GUI dialogs for very, very simple and
superficial settings).

[51] Security / Level & checks: This is a very useful tool to set up low
level security details from a high level perspective. Very good indeed,
but not essential regarding a novice user trying to tame his machine into
productive condition. Fine tuning the security is a next level requirement
in this sense. Here is what this tool offers: Four tabs,
  o Basic Options: 5 levels of (Poor, Standard, High, Higher, Paranoid)
predefined security levels. In the other tabs it is possible to tweak the
details. But tweaking is usually unnecessary because the defaults are
quite sensible and fine tuned.
  o Network Options: Network related settings (pull-down menus of "yes",
"no", "default", and "ignore") such as IP spoofing protection, etc.
  o System Options: Numerous system-wide security settings, again as pull
down menus, such as allowing remote login, X Authorization, allowing
predefined hourly and daily security check-up (cron jobs) etc.
  o Periodic checks: List of what to check for in hourly and daily cron
jobs, ranging from running chkrootkit to check world-writable files to
suid/sgid and other permission changes, etc.

[52] Permissions: What files/directories to check in hourly check routine.
An editable list.

[53] Firewall: Just a check-box list of 8 most popular services to block,
plus a free entry field to enter any other ports to block. Nothing more
than a basic blocking-list. The fact that 47 and 53 is not combined might
be due to emphasizing eye-candy over efficiency, or due to making system
management more intuitive to new users. I think it's the second one.
They've scattered iptables setup so that it is more intuitive to manage
for a new user.

Sub Total: 53 is rather basic and should be doable by means of numerous
tools. 52 is an extension of 51, and 51 is a very cool utility but not
essential for a client oriented distro. (Mandrake is targeting both client
and server use, so such a utility is more relevant for them than Kanotix.)

[61] Menus: Here we go. It is a menufile / update-menus editor replacing
kmenuedit (which is installed but carefully avoided in K-Menu to route the
unsuspecting users over to Mandrake's own menu editor). Having the luxury
of providing their own software repository, Mandrake redesigned their own
menu, thus made Gnome and KDE menus identical, and manages them thru a
single menu editor (and update-menus). I don't know whether kmenuedit
edits just K-Menu or capable to manage the menus through update-menus.
They've solved their menu prettyfication and consolidation in this way.

[62] Display manager: Just a radio button selection box between mdk-kdm (a
crippled version of kdm) and gdm. If you've post-installed kdm, it also
shows up in this list.

[63] Services: A combined list of init.d *and* xinetd.d services, each
entry containing;
  o Service (file) name
  o Its "status"
  o An [Info] button displaying the "description:" entry in the file
  o A check-box to run it during start-up (for init.d services) or to
enable it as xinetd service.
  o Two buttons to start and stop the service.

[64] Fonts: List of installed fonts and in which applications (Ghostscript,
OpenOffice, Abiword, Generic printers) to use them, options to uninstall
and import them (including importing the MS fonts from the Windows
partition in a dual boot machine).

[65] Date and time: The same dialog when "adjust time" selected from the
clock applet in KDE panel.

[66] Logs: A utility to grep through various log files (of arbitrary
dates).

[67] Console: Plain old "sudo konsole"

[68] Users and groups: A kuser workalike.

[69] Backups: A GUI backup utility.

Sub Total: All of them are either already included, or available around as
OSS utilities.

[71] & [72] & [73] & [74]: synaptic (or kynaptic) equivalents of apt-get
install, remove, ugrade, and sources.list editor. All functionality is
already provided by synaptic, plus more.

[81] Remote Control: Remote rfb access (as a client or server) and client
for Windows Terminal Services. Again, all of them are available as open
source utilities. [[BTW I don't understand why people use rfb/vnc for
local POSIX-to-POSIX (Linux and Unix) access while there is XDMCP?]]

All in all, some of them are good utilities, but most of them are just
mediocre ones already been floating around for a long time. What makes it
valuable for an end user is that they are consolidated, and they've been
careful to cater for the most needed management utilities, so that a
novice user won't have to look elsewhere, but manage his system from
drakconf for most-all things.
================================================================

Best regards,
-- 
Abdullah Ramazanoglu
aramazan ÄT myrealbox D0T cöm