Re: the future of GNOME Applets

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 16:52 +0200, Carlos Garcia Campos wrote:
> > On Maw, 2004-09-21 at 14:12, Davyd Madeley wrote:

> > You want more than monitor - a lot of the systems can set policies so
> > you want policy selector. These tend to include "performance", "maximum
> > battery life" and the like. Sometimes you need to switch at runtime (eg
> > when playing bzflag) to avoid the CPU speed change messing with your
> > game.
> 
> For to set a policy is necessary to be root and in a common case an
> applet is not running as root. I think it can be solved by using an
> external program as a policy selector. It will prompt for root password,
> like the clock applet does calling to gst to set the time. The problem
> is that it could be an annoying process for a so simple task.

A laptop system will likely be configured for this to not be the case.
If I handed out a laptop running Linux to employees here, I'd definitely
do that.  Laptops are usually single-user systems and it's not like
adjusting the policy is going to severely damage anything.  (Assuming
the available policies _are_ locked down.)

The applet could provide a menu of the policy options.  When one is
clicked, an external tool is run to do the actual change.  This tool
can, on systems that are designed that actually care about ease-of-use,
use something like console-helper - it'll either just do its job without
any complaint (and the applet will be updated to reflect the new
policy), or it'll popup the authentication dialog to pester users about
the root password.  (or the user password, or whatever policy the admin
has configured.)
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.