Re: [Usability] Re: Button ordering

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Sun, 2001-11-04 at 05:47, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On 04Nov2001 12:59PM (+0100), Mathias Hasselmann wrote:
> > 
> > 	Well. So let's hack nautilus to support volume labeling and let's
> > encourage the distributors to use the volumen labeling feature during
> > installation. Well and then we still have this chance:
> > 
> > 	printf(..., *volume_name ? volume_name : device_name);
> > 
> > 	Where device name would be something like /dev/hda1 or
> > "first volume on the first $model_name harddisk". The model name would be
> > in /proc/ide/hda/model on lnx boxes. Guess the "real" Unices have similiar
> > capabilities. Maybe we need a small library here.
> > 
> 
> The mountpoint (e.g. "/usr/local") is likely to be more clear to the
> user than the device name, when one exists (either currently set or in
> /etc/fstab for unmounted drives). I suggested this in my original
> proposal. 

Gene was originally looking at trying to change the ext2 volume name.
Unfortunately changing the volume name (or even reading it, I think,
though I'm not as sure about that) requires root privileges. I see this
and other problems caused by Linux's multi-user nature as a recurring
theme in GNOME. It'd be nice to make it easy for application developers
to make it easy for users to temporarily assume the root hat and make
changes (without having to launch a completely new program as root).

For example, it would be neat if Nautilus could prompt the user for the
root password if they tried dragging images into /usr/share/pixmaps. Or
Gedit could prompt for root priviledges when the user tried to edit
/etc/lilo.conf. In some cases, such as XST, this can be done the first
time the program is started up, but for many applications it would be
good to have any easy way to run a particular block of code as root.

I have absolutely no clue about these issues or how feasible this stuff
is. For example, is it possible to spawn a thread as a different user?
(probably not, just fishing). Or maybe we could do this with CORBA or
something. *shrug* I have absolutely no clue. MacOS/X seems to be able
to do something like this, no clue if its easy for developers or not.

Alan? George? Somebody with a clue about this sort of system issue? ;-)

-Seth

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