Lessons from XP

[Erik Bågfors]

> 
> I tried SuSE, and I didn't like the visual style of YaST or any of its
> configuration tools; the complete antithesis of everything that I've
> liked so far in XP.  The visual style is far too cluttered -- from
> popping up tens of thousands of windows, to having every window that is
> popped up incredibly cluttered with buttons and options -- and I just
> don't like it.  I struggled to do network configuration in SuSE.

I agree on this.
 
> > 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
> 
> Right -- this is the only plausible solution.

Which is why I don't like gst for it. It clutters my /etc/hosts file.
I assume because it converts it to xml internally and then when it
converts it back it's cluttered.  At least that used to happen 6-8
months ago.
 
> > 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.
> 
> Having a 'leave this one to fate' (i.e. don't mangle it) option would be
> very good.

You have that.  You can simply define that that resource should be left alone.
 
> > 3) You can boot directly into a certain profile from grub
> 
> While this is very nice, I do believe that the consensus was that GRUB
> should not be shown; I don't think there is any right answer to
> selecting network profiles, as popping up a dialog box at boot (a la
> laptop-net) isn't that great either.

Well.  That has it's down sides.
1) My dhcp on my network card needs to timeout when I'm home because I
use a wireless.  By booting into the right configuration at once I
avoid that
2) At work I have dual screen and at home I want 3d accelerated single
screen.  This means that the change in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 need to
done before X starts.

I think the option should be availiable for advanced users even if
it's nothing that's added automatically.


> > 4) It has a nice simple to use GUI.
> 
> See above.

Well... I should rephrase that. It has a simple to use GUI.  The nice
part is a totally different thing.
 
> > 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.
> 
> Ubuntu's philosophy is Python everywhere, yes.
>

And I wrote it in perl just because that was quicker for me. But it
has no requirements on anything that isn't default in ubuntu.  I think
anyway.

> > 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.
> 
> Sounds good.  Do you have any sources anyone can look at?
> 

I sure have, give me a few days. However, the code isn't something I'm
proud of.  I see it mostly as a prof-of-concept thing for my own use. 
I think the concept is right but the code could be rewritten.

I'll let you know. 

Regards,
Erik