Advocacy report [part 2]

[Paul G Cooper <pgc maths warwick ac uk>]

This part concerns my efforts in creating a gnome environment for some new
machines (and new students) in the Maths department. It's meant partly as
advice if anyone else as unskilled as me has to do this, partly to give
feedback to the developers, and partly to ask for some help with the
outstanding problems. This message is long ;-/

What we wanted was a nice simple setup for students who were either used
to windows or not used to computers at all. What we wanted was a nice
'neutral' background,  a minimal menu (but without wiping out the system
menu alltogether), a corner panel with foot menu, tasklist, and logout
button.

This was easy to do: I simply created this setup in my user account. On
the properties of the foot menu I chose for the sys menu to be in a
submenu and for the user menu to be on the menu. I then added the stuff we
wanted to my user menu using the menu config app. Easy peasy. Used
control centre to change the background and changed the panel to a corner
panel and added a logout button.

Now I just copied these files/dirs from .gnome to the skel setup

Background
apps/
panel  
panel.d/

and hey presto folks have a customized setup when their accounts is
created (for legacy reason it's a little more complicated for us but
morally just as easy).

I also rm'd the file /usr/lib/desktop-links/redhat.links (or whatever it's
called - I removed so can't check ;-) so that the desktop would have only
the Home dir and floppy disk icons.

I created a nice little warwick maths logo to put in gdm2 and altered the
config so that the system menu doesn't appear.

So well done gnome developers this bit was easy!

Here are the problems I've found so far;

. in gnome terminal the setup *seems* to be machine specific. Logon to one
machine change the prefs logout and logon to another and the changes
aren't there. Login to the original machine and they are. The default
white on black setup is awful as well.

. mounting/unmounting - yes this old chestnut is still with us. In a way
the automounting on double click of the floppy icon makes this worse
because users are unaware that they've even mounted the floppy so don't
relaise they have to unmount it after use. I've had a little play with
autofs but so far have been unable to make it work. Any tips or advice
would be greatly appreciated.

I did wonder if it would be possible for gmc to unount the drive as soon
as the last window on the floppy was closed?

Perhaps putting a umount /mnt/floppy in the PostSession of gdm (or in
.logout) might prevent the next user from having (initial) problems? Just
had these ideas and haven't had a chance to try.

. middle mouse click to copy has caused problems - to be honest I've
forgotten what windows does so I'm not sure why - people seemed to think
that left drag and drop a file should create a copy NOT move it. Another
factor is that it isn't abvious what is the 'middle' mouse button. For
instance some of the mice are Genius Netmouse pro's and with those the
little button on the side ('under the thumb') acts as the middle mouse
button. On a two button mouse you have to use both buttons together, and
on a wheel mouse the wheel is the middle button (which isn't obvious even
though the wheel is in the middle). It would be nice if this were (easily)
configurable - or is it and I am being ignorant?

. This isn't a problem with gnome but an observation. It's curious how the
it's fairly easy to spot windows users on these machines. They've all got
17in monitors and are running at 1280x1024 or 1182x864. Windows users
*tend* to run everything full screen one at a time, where as people with
previous unix experience tend to have more than one thing on screen at a
time. This might also have something to do with typical home computer
monitor size. Someone aked me if it is possibel to switch the resolution
to 800x600 because web pages are nicer in that resolution - I was
momentarily stunned ;-) I noticed someone has written a resolution
switching applet which I might investigate.

Rightnow I'm writing an FAQ for the students using the new machines and so
far the questions all relate to using the floppy but I can post new
questions (and my answers) to the list if folks are interested.

Paul