Lessons from XP

[Erik Bågfors]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 02:19:23 -0700, Daniel Stone
<daniel.stone at canonical.com> wrote:
> 
> Firstly, their installer is, visually, very nice; the total antithesis
> to Anaconda.  The screen was very sparse and uncluttered, and I very
> much appreciated being able to immediately spot what I needed to do.  Of
> course, telling it whether I had a static/dynamic IP/DNS wasn't terribly
> intuitive (and defaulted to static!), but that aside, the install
> process wasn't too bad.  There was an incredibly annoying background
> sound, so the first button I ever pressed after power was mute.
> Multimedia keyboards do, it seems, have a use after all.


You have to realize that XP is already pre-installed on IBM boxes. 
All you go through is a short setup thingy and not an actuall install
of the entire OS. That's quite some difference.

> However, there was one thing I did like about their networking: roaming
> profiles.  I've been messing with the idea for a while, and got a
> half-arsed Python script together a while ago that I've since lots.
> Simply put, you tell it where you are, and you can specify everything
> there: the wireless network to stick to, proxy/VPN settings, IPs, DNS,
> everything.  As someone who requires a proxy at uni (and it can be one
> of three, depending on where at uni I am; but they all require SSH
> ProxyCommand loving and some tunnels), and sometimes SSH ProxyCommand
> love, this feature was massively appreciated.  Sort of like OS X, except
> a little more extensive, I suspect.
> 
> I would kill for this feature.

Good because I agree

Have any of you tried SuSE? It has a killer thing for this named SCPM.
 I absolutely love and NEED this feature.  I wrote a mail to
ubuntu-devel about it but it recived no answers.  You can check that
mail here http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2004-September/000166.html

This program has a few very good ideas,
1) It works with the config files that already exists, which means you
can use whatever config tool you like, or simply edit the files by
hand if you like
2) You can select exactly what resources you want to include in the
profile management. You can have different network settings, ntp
settings, X settings, apache settings (which may just be on or off), 
firewall settings and so on.
3) You can boot directly into a certain profile from grub
4) It has a nice simple to use GUI.

I started to try and port it but it is a big c++ crap thing and I
thought that it would be a lot simpler to rewrite it into perl (or
python) and started to do that.  It's almost done, nr 3 and 4 is still
to do, and lot's of resource configuration of course.

I'm doing it totally in ubuntu and am willing to let other people try
it as soon as possible.  I'm also willing to delete the whole thing
and join anyone creating a new one.

Regards,
Erik