Would an lts.conf configurator gui be useful?

[David Groos]

Hi John,

Sorry it took me so long to respond.  From my point of view as a teacher,
this is a great idea--I've become familiar with the CLI and even like it for
doing tasks that I do often enough to remember the tasks, but I'm a teacher
and my main job is to teach and improve my teaching--a massively challenging
job (and I've been teaching for 22 years now).  The questions on which I
ought to be breaking my brain are, for example, "How do I best introduce
this online model of
solubility<http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/soluble-salts>to my
6th period students since their brains are tired and they are antsy
not to mention the particular mix of personalities?"  I'd rather not
dedicate my brain-energy to figuring out some sudo nano thisandthat.conf.

The gui you described not only makes it easier, but puts the options right
out there, teaching the person what the options are--much easier to
experiment with and learn (and as I mentioned, re-learn).  I've got an
additional idea too, would it be possible to somehow select a group of
clients and apply the same configs to them--manage the machines by groups
such as location/classrooms?  The gui you propose does another thing, it
lowers the bar to entry into the world of LTSP, and as I work to teach
people in my district about the benefits of Edubuntu, anything that makes it
easier for techs to sink their cognitive teeth into this technology, the
better.

Finally, if you are still interested in getting feedback about your idea, I
would recommend sending this question out to the "Edubuntu Users Group" <
edubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>, "ubuntu-education" <
ubuntu-education at lists.ubuntu.com> lists as they might be the people that
would most feel the need for the gui support and they may well not be
subscribed to the dev list.

Thanks for your work,
David G

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 5:51 PM, john <lists.john at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I was talking with a co-worker who thought it would be great if you could
> configure lts.conf options to thin clients via a gui. Maybe the gui
> would populate itself with
> all of the mac addresses that were thin clients (via arp ?) and you
> could point and click your way through the
> various options configurable through lts.conf.
>
> It might look something like:
>
> +[aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff]
> +[ff:ee:dd:cc:bb:aa]
> ...
>
> And when you clicked on the mac address in question you'd get something
> like:
>
> [aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff]
> +GENERAL PARAMETERS
> +SCRIPTS AND MODULES
> +PRINTER PARAMETERS
> +KEYBOARD PARAMETERS
> +TOUCHSCREEN PARAMETERS
> +SOUND AND VOLUME CONTROL PARAMETERS
> +XORG PARAMETERS
> +XRANDR OPTIONS
> +SCREEN SCRIPTS
> +LDM OPTIONS
> +LOCAL APPLICATIONS
>
> And drilling further you'd see:
>
> [aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff]
> +GENERAL PARAMETERS
> +SCRIPTS AND MODULES
> +PRINTER PARAMETERS
> +KEYBOARD PARAMETERS
> +TOUCHSCREEN PARAMETERS
> +SOUND AND VOLUME CONTROL PARAMETERS
> +XORG PARAMETERS
> +XRANDR OPTIONS
> +SCREEN SCRIPTS
> +LDM OPTIONS
> LOCAL APPLICATIONS
>    LOCAL_APPS
>           boolean, default True
>
>           Enables support for running local apps on the thin client.
>
>       LOCAL_APPS_MENU
>           boolean, default False
>
>           Enables overriding of menu items from remote (server)
> applications.
>           If this is set to True, local applications in the users menu will
>           be used instead of the applications on the server.
>
>       LOCAL_APPS_MENU_ITEMS
>           string, default unset
>
>           This item should contain a comma separated list of application
>           names as they appear on their .desktop files.
>
>       LOCAL_APPS_WHITELIST
>
> At the individual attribute level you'd have a radio button or
> something for booleans and box for strings.
>
> Maybe something already exists like this? Maybe it's a bad idea for some
> reason?
>
> I'd be interested in knowing what folks think.
>
> John
>
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