Mentor Needed - SAMBA/Menus

[Yazen Ghannam]

Hello everyone,

My name is Yazen and I am an Electrical Engineering student at the
University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, USA. I have studied
the C programming language in school and have applied it a bit in some
of my classes. I'd like to learn more and better programming skills;
currently, I'm learning C++ and GTK+/gtkmm. I use Ubuntu as my main OS
and I would like to become more involved in the development process.

While browsing the GSoC ideas page, I found two ideas that I feel would
be very useful.

The first is improving the file/folder sharing experience using SAMBA. I
have two computers at home, a desktop with Ubuntu and a laptop with
Vista Home Premium. I was able to set up file sharing between the two
using the SAMBA configuration file (smb.conf) and after reading some
online tutorials and manuals. But many people might find this process
too long or intimidating and so a GUI would be better.  There is a
package called "system-config-samba" that is a GUI for SAMBA shares but
it is not installed by default with SAMBA and is not supported. This
package, or one similar to it, should be installed by default, supported
and integrated into Ubuntu's network interface. For example, the
NetworkManagerApplet should have the ability to differentiate between a
private and public network and disable shares accordingly. All of this
could be integrated into a "Network Control Panel" similar to the one
found in Vista.

The second idea is organizing the Preferences/Administration menus.
Grouping some of the icons together in more specific menus (like Fedora)
would be a good start. For example, Synaptic Package Manager, Software
Sources, and Update Manager can all be filed under a "Software" menu
within the Administration menu. Another grouping might be to put
Keyboard, SCIM Input, and Mouse all under an "Input Devices"
menu. After grouping, we could try and see if some tools may be merged
together, for example Printing and Default Printer.

These two ideas are simple and specific enough to be completed this
summer. They would also improve Ubuntu's easy of use for a greater
number of people. Both ideas are very popular and have been active for
over a year on Ubuntu Brainstorm.

If anyone is interested in being a mentor for either of these two ideas,
please let me know.

Thank you,

Yazen