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Hi
>>> Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie> 05.01.2004 18:11:14 >>> >Hey, > > >Okay, so my take on this: > >gnome-remote-desktop >-------------------- > >A fairly nice looking frontend for clients for various protocols - VNC, >RDP, XDCMP and ICA/Citrix. > >I like the idea but there are some problems: > >+ The actual clients themselves aren't very gnome-ish. For example if >you were using VNC, it would launch one of the many incarnations of >vncviewer ... all of which have a terrible UI. > >+ The user is exposed to a lot of very confusing concepts, not least >of which is the protocols themselves. I don't think we can say that >many user's will know the difference between "VNC", "RDP", "XDMCP" >and "ICA" and choose between them. > >+ The interface is very different from any other GNOME interface and >doesn't really seem to follow the HIG at all. > >+ The code doesn't lend itself to easy improvement. What's especially >worrying is that the entire interface is constructed manually in >a single monolithic function rather using glade. Given that the >UI needs so much work, it would have been much more promising if >it used glade. I've looked through these utilities in December and had the same impressen.
Therefore I've started to update these utilities. The first was
gnome-remote-shell that looks much more gnome-like now.
>
> >gnome-desktop-sharing >--------------------- > >A VNC server which doesn't require you to start up another X display >like other VNC servers so someone can remotely connect to your session. >System administrators, in particular, are crying out for this >functionality. > >My main worries about adding this to 2.6 are: > >+ The libvncserver dependancy. libvncserver has some real problems >around its build system etc., but the main worry is that its not >seeing enough active development that would give you hope that it >will improve much. > >+ You need to start the server from the command line manually. > > >There are other problems, but I'll be releasing a new implementation of >this feature soon (hopefully) that addresses a lot of the problems. >gnome-desktop-sharing is a good start, though. > > >gnome-netinfo >------------- > >A frontend for various command line utilities like ifconfig, ping, >finger, traceroute etc. > >+ This really strikes me as a bit of a "geek tool" rather than >something that belongs in the desktop release. Its a pretty >nice interface to these tools, but its not really any more >intuitive that using the command line versions. Only someone >with a pretty good knowledge of how networks work wouldn't >be scared off by this. There are many people out there coming from windows these days and they are familiar with NetDemon or NetScan Tools. They love
this tool because they want something "point and click" instead of
the console. I think we should have the not so very skilled network
administrator in mind if we speak about this tool. I know lots of
customers who can "use" graphical tools to analyze IP stuff but they
don't want to use a console for these tasks.
>
>+ Portability concerns: because most of this uses the output from >command line tools, there'll probably be a lot of work getting >it to work on other platforms. Even on linux you have the worry >that the format of the command line tool output possibly changing. I agree that in the future the information should come from real API's >
> >gnome-remote-shell >------------------ > >A sweet frontend for ssh-ing or telnet-ing to a remote host. Reminds me >of "putty" on Windows. > >+ Again, I'm a little worried that this is another "geek tool", but >I suppose if we include a terminal then there isn't much reason >not to include this. > >Silly thought: could this feature not belong in the terminal ? Again, people want something Putty like, not the console, so we should
provide something like this.
> >+ It seems strange to me that the dialog doesn't go away when you >connect ... I think it is a good feature that the dialog stays on the screen. Most of the
time users connect to different hosts. Putty or other tools don't go away
as soon as you connect with a host as well.
> >+ I would have thought this belongs under the system tools menu as >"Remote Terminal". > Ulrich |