Re: GNOME Usability Improvements - Fix the window manager!

["Scott Haug" <eldamitri hotmail com>]

On Thu, 5 Aug 1999 02:54:06 Ronald de Man <deman@win.tue.nl> writes
>There's a Gnome Workshop project (with no less than 3 word processor
>attempts, which I think is a bit unfortunate).

A terrible shame, I agree.

>
>
>It can and should be easier to set up. I haven't looked at gnome-ppp
>for a while, but last time I checked it was not possible to do the
>whole setup from within gnome-ppp. Nowadays with most ISPs you only
>need three bits of information: phone number, login name, password.
>All other data is pretty standard. Gnome-ppp should at least be able
>to ask for these three, and set things up accordingly. (Okay, I guess
>it should also be told where to find the modem device.)
>However, the user guide says:
>
>---
>Although gnome-ppp attempts to make configuring a PPP connection as easy as 
>possible, there are still
>several files that need to be edited as superuser (root) for gnome-ppp to 
>work properly. gnome-ppp itself is
>not a set-user-id program, nor does it have any helper programs that pose 
>any security risk. gnome-ppp
>uses the permissions of the /usr/sbin/pppd program, which the user of 
>gnome-ppp must have permission to
>execute.
>---
>
>So the novice user reboots to windows.
>

I've found that the program wvdial does a lot of this setup for me, and is 
hands-down the easiest dial-up app I've found for linux.  It has allowed me 
to bypass gnome-ppp altogether.  It handles modem detection, it determines 
the correct init strings, it has a heuristic approach for determining how to 
log in with ppp.  Setup is ridiculously simple (so much so, I don't remember 
now exactly what I needed to do to get it running, but it took less than a 
minute).  The only thing it didn't do that Windows could was determine my 
DNS dynamically.  I now use wvdial with modem-lights on the panel to dial 
in.  Under properties:

Connect command: wvdial &
Disconnect command: killall wvdial

If my isp, modem, or supernatural powers kick me off for whatever reason, 
wvdial automatically dials back in again.  Its pretty nice.  Now, if it can 
work that easily by piecing it together with an unrelated gnome applet, 
surely it can't be *that* hard to make a gnome-specific app that is even 
more seemless.  I'd volunteer, but it's not one of my itches at the moment, 
and I've got plenty others that need scratching.  I think someone has 
written a KDE version of it cleverly called kwvdial.  I don't know how well 
it works, since I don't use kde, but I'm sure using wvdial to write gwvdial 
(or, please God, something with a better name) would make this experience 
much more pleasant for everyone.

BTW, wvdial can be found on freshmeat.net, I believe.

>
>I think some autodetection is possible. And it should be allowed
>to take floppies out whenever there is no disk activity (I think
>that's possible when you set nosync in /etc/fstab, but I haven't
>tried it yet).
>
>It would also be nice if gmc windows (including the desktop) would
>automatically detect directory changes (so that icons appear whenever
>a new file is created, etc.).

Someone mentioned using autofs to do this.  I don't know much, if anything, 
about autofs, but the other poster (I believe it was Mr. Cape) mentioned 
about it being difficult to setup.  Would autofs allow for autodetection of 
floppies, cd-roms, etc., and how hard would it be to write an app to make it 
easier to use (such as what wvdial does for dial-up connections...)?

Thanks for your time,

-Scott


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