RE: 2.4: System Tools - Please try them

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

I have general concerns that the system tools I'm seeing are also not
really the ones that we have a big need for, and are often confusing.
That said, as I'm sure you all know, I'm a big fan of GNOME starting to
think of itself as an operating system and provide a uniform interface
to hardware/system settings, and gst seems like a good place to start.

"Boot" - maybe useful, but probably not something you'd have as a
seperate dialogue in a perfect world.

"Networking" - Great! Probably the most common system configuration task
(though less important when DHCP stuff just works, but it doesn't
always).

"Runlevel" - A *services* focused dialogue would be awesome, much like
RH presents under "setup" where you can click and turn things on and
off. Mixing this with the traditional unix runlevels, and presenting it
as such in the menus, is confusing and gets in the way of what people
usually want to do, which is just to turn something on or off.

"Time" - great, but maybe doesn't need a menu item and should be just
under the right click menu of the clock applet.

"Users" - good to have, esp. if you're admining a machine

In general I'm not sure having these all under a "System Tools" category
is what we want. System Tools (i.e. things requiring root access) can be
of very different natures. As I've suggested before the best approach
might be to provide a "requires root access" emblem, or to use a special
icon style for items requiring root access (like Black and White or
something). Also the amount of time the applets take to start up (esp.
w/ the scanning system stuff) is a little irritating, but maybe there's
no way to work around that and still keep system abstraction...

I'd like us to consider the gst as items for inclusion, but in a future
release of GNOME when more of their usability issues can be resolved
(and to work more closely with the gst folk to specify what we
want/need, how they should fit in with the desktop prefs, etc). 

-Seth

On Thu, 2003-05-29 at 05:14, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > From: Cumming Murray (COMNEON Linz) 
> > > From: Cumming Murray (COMNEON Linz) 
> > > So, people need to try them out _now_ and start the 
> > > criticism. The GEP 11
> > > end date is June 2nd - 4 days from now.
> > ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gnome-system-tools/
> 
> So here's some superficial comments on 0.26.0:
> 
> - RedHat 9 is not officially supported - it shows a warning. 
>   Lots of the GNOME developers are using RedHat9, so it would be nice to fix
> that.
> 
> - Where are they supposed to show up in the GNOME menu?
>   I had to launch them from the command-line.
> 
> - The executable names are a bit too generic.
>   For instance, I would prefer gnome-network-admin to network-admin.
>   Let's avoid confusion with distro-specific tools.
> 
> - They are not quite HIGgy enough, but that can be fixed easily.
> 
> - We need to lose the Ximian icons, I think.
> 
> - Runlevel Settings: The icons are obscure and color-coded.
> 
> - I guess we want to use the proposed GNOME ask-for-root-password thing
> instead. What's happening with that?
> 
> - The tools do some checking and processing at first. I think they should
> show at least a busy cursor while doing this.
> 
> - Various tools crash on close for me, though actually I see this warning:
> *** ERROR **: vte.c: line 6850 (vte_terminal_process_incoming): assertion
> failed (_vte_buffer_length(terminal->pvt->incoming) > 0 )
> aborting ...
> 
> - Boot manager:
>   - The initial window size is too small - the TreeView is smaller than one
> row.
>   - Again the obscure and color-coded lightbulb icons.
> 
> - Networking:
>   - It's shows my network connection, but doesn't show what type of
> connection it is.
>   - Again, the lightbulbs.
>   - Shouldn't the profile choice be at the top of the screen, if everything
> else depends on it?
>   - I can't see what device is used for each connection. Surely I need to
> know whether I'm using my WLAN card or my ethernet card?
> 
> Murray Cumming
> murrayc usa net
> www.murrayc.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
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