[ubuntu-uk] Home/Small Business Server

[Dave Morley]

On 26/09/11 22:18, Bruno Girin wrote:
> On 26/09/11 21:35, Matthew Daubney wrote:
>> On 26 September 2011 21:17, Alan Pope<alan at popey.com>  wrote:
>> <snip>
>>
>>> Ahh, SoHo server... a perennial "want" of many (including myself).
>> I'm getting so annoyed by this being missing it's starting to become 
>> an itch :(
>>
>>> I'll refer you to this spec:-
>>>
>>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuEasyBusinessServer
>> Ah, lovely. I agreed with it largely until this....
>> "The interface will be web based"
>> And then I wanted to curl up in the foetal position and cry.
>>
>> BEWARE RANT AHOY!
>>
>> <rant>
>> Why do people always want these things web based? I'd much rather
>> prefer something that works simply in a nice easy gui that I could
>> VNC/whatever into. In order to make things like this web based, you
>> either have to lose some flexibility and/or can make it really hard to
>> report back to the user what actually is going on. I've never really
>> found a web based configuration gui I liked (and I write them for
>> work).
> Well the main benefit of a web based UI is that you don't need all the 
> desktop GUI libraries on the server, which means that the server stays 
> a server and can be a fairly lean machine that doesn't burn CPU to 
> paint a desktop (important for a small office where running a powerful 
> server 24x7 can be prohibitively expensive and/or noisy). And 
> considering the size and complexity of GUI code these days, adding a 
> GUI to a server is likely to increase the potential for bug several 
> folds.
>
> I hear what you say about web front-ends but balancing the pros and 
> cons, I would still go for a web front-end, mainly to keep the server 
> lightweight. This doesn't preclude a standard GUI front-end on client 
> machines though.
>
> Bruno
>
>
Daft suggest possibly.

How about a simple ncursor based cli interface.  Light enough for ssh 
forwarding gui enough for a novice user to click on buttons.  I know 
it's not as pretty as some *cough* light *cough* desktops but should 
suffice.



-- 
Seek that thy might know.