Re: Freature suggestion for gnome 2.0

["Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero" <famrom idecnet com>]

hobbit@aloss.ukuu.org.uk (2000-08-22 at 0020.01 +0100):
[...]
> > And, if I'm not stretching this too far, perhaps the comment field should
> > be the default for new users of GNOME?

Maybe. The idea of ordering menus by task was great, and should never
change, and that one could be optional. I would put announce as one of
the first tip of the day, and big in the menu documentation: "You can
have a menu that show names (XChat), command line (xchat) or long
descriptions (XChat, an Internet Relay Chat client). And get all that
info using the secondary meny (normally right click)". [As Telsa
suggests]

> I like this. Something else I like very much I am going to rant 
> about here, because I have run into this in different situations
> several times over.
[...]
> Well, go on. Tell me how you guessed the command-line invocation of
> "GNOME System Monitor"
> "GNOME LinuxConf" 
> "Disk Management"
> "Change Password"
> "RH Network Monitor"
> "PPP dialup utility"

I guess such thing with ps or top. But I do not use them normally, I
am too old style, I end editing config files or running text based
apps.

> How did you get past the nice cheery names on the menu and discover
> the actual commands to type at a blank root prompt?

Forgeting about the menus, and searching for apps based in
task. Sometimes they are GNOME apps, sometimes they are not.

> There is absolutely no simple way to do this. Anyone suggesting
> "look in $prefix/share/gnome/*/*.desktop" gets minus points. 
> Doubly so because in many of those it's the wrong answer. In addition,
> the menu-editor won't help you here... 

top or ps... but you have to know how to read it.

> Anyway. I have half a solution:
> I would very much like to see, either in the About box or by
> right-clicking on the menu, "Run this from the command-line with..."
> and "Part of package:" (another thing that's impossible to find
> out until you have learnt far more than you actually wanted to know). 

Both, in the secondary menu and in the about. Gnome CC says which
kernel version, distro and other info, why apps can not say what
package or command line they are?

> It can't be hard to add something to gnome_about() or whatever it's
> called, and it can't be that hard to have a "right-click on menu"
> addition, surely?
> But it's really not fair to say "run GNOME as a user and su to root
> to run applications that require it" when they have completely
> impossible-to-guess names. It would be helpful if we provided a
> way for people to find out the names so they _could_ run them as root.

Good point. Menu preferences plus extra info would be great.

GSR