Re: [gnome-love] Anyone done this before?

[Paul Cooper <pgc ucecom com>]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 09:25:24AM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 14, 2001 at 02:13:58AM -0700 or thereabouts, Ryan Marsh wrote:
> > Has anyone tried something like this with Gnome?
> >
> > http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/08/10/1441239&mode=thread
> >
> > I've tried a small setup similar to theirs and all I can say is it was a
> > total bitch. Trying to host several users running Nautilus and Evolution
> > on completely remote X clients with preconfigured desktops, and
> > restricting their configuration isn't exactly as simple as:
> >
> > export DISPLAY=somemachine:0
> > xclock
>
> Eighteen months ago, Paul Cooper set up GNOME for the maths department
> of Warwick University, and wrote it up. He asked for any other people
> who'd set it up for lots of people to contribute their accounts. 
>
> No-one did. Well, I did hassle a bunch of people for details of how
> they'd done it and got some, but they didn't send it to Paul and I,
> um, forgot. 
>
> I don't think Paul really maintains the doc now, but it is still
> available at http://www.darboux.uklinux.net/gnome/

Hey thats me! No I don't maintain it any more for two reasons. The
main reason is that I don't work as a sysadmin anymore so don't have
the need or the ability to work on that sort of stuff. Also I received
absolutely zero feedback. 

I think things are very different now though - there was no nautilus
and evolution back when I did that setup. Our biggest problem was
getting people to understand mounting/unmount floppies and also trying
to use automount so they didn't have to worry. THis problem still
persists although mandrake and supermount mostly fix it (supermount is
great it 7.2 but flakey in 8.0). The approach taken by the Laro people
with Xterminals cleverly make that all moot. 

Anyway we also used Xterms in some offices, running various wm's /
desktops and had no more difficulty with gnome than any other.

> GNOME has lots of little gotchas, and has very little documentation
> on how you set it up for a ton of users with control over what they
> can and can't do. I suspect that is resulting in it simply not being 
> set up in situations which are like that described in the article
> about Largo above.

If you want to lock things down then going then using xterms like
largo or the approach jwz took at his nightclub
(http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/) is the way to go
whatever you're using - it means you only really have one machine to
admin. Trying to keep n desktop machines in synced consistent state is
tricky - things like kickstart and autorpm can make it easier.

When sun announced gnome 2.0 as their desktop of the future I thought
that admin issues and documentation would be a good place for them to
help with their experience and facilities (anyone from sun listening?
;-)

Just my 2p

Paul 

> I'm not sure this is really gnome-love-fodder, but I'm also not
> sure where else it should go, beyond gnome-list in its general
> catch-all capacity. 
>
> Telsa
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-love mailing list
> gnome-love gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-love

-- 
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Paul Cooper                             |  Tel: 0121 331 7858
Senior Programmer and Database Engineer |  Fax: 0121 331 7859
UCEcom                                  |  mailto:pgc ucecom com
University of Central England           |  http://www.ucecom.com
Birmingham, B4 7DX                      |
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