Re: Gnome is a problem for OEMs

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Daniel Carrera">

> I've spent all afternoon trying to figure out how I, as an OEM, can
> configure Gnome before giving it to a user. I just want to change some
> icons on the panel and maybe a menu entry.

So there are good bits and bad bits about this aspect of GNOME. It's not a
wildly mature area of work. What you'll find is that the documentation and
work done for systems administrators will be of most help to you. Definitely
look at Sabayon, Pessulus and the System Administration Guide [1]. This is
an area of active work in GNOME at the moment - hitching OEM customisation
to that effort will probably do well.

It would really, really help us if you could document some of the use cases
you have, so that we know the kinds of things you want to do. Some of them
will seem outright obvious of course, but that's okay - they're the hammers
you'll have most fun hitting us with. :-)

We can find a home for this stuff in the wiki, so we can document all the
kinds of branding and customisation use cases you (and other OEMs) want to
do.

I'd definitely like to help here (with many of my hats on) - the more info
we provide to developers, the more likely it is that they can help us out!

Thanks - this is a very important topic to delve into.

- Jeff

[1] http://www.gnome.org/learn/admin-guide/latest/

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