Desktop FreeBSD

[Vulpes Velox]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:23:00 +0000
Michal Pasternak <michal at pasternak.w.lub.pl> wrote:

> Vulpes Velox [Wed, Sep 17, 2003 at 04:06:54PM -0500]:
> > Should this possibly be moved to another list and if so which one?
> 
> freebsd-chat@ ?
> 
> > 2: Using some light WM as a defualt, but using custamized menus and the like
> > for defualt. Possibly setting it up so it comes with predefined configs for
> > various WMs.
> 
> Have you seen how Debian handles this issue?
> 
> Debian packages, which are suitable for placing in such GUI menu, install
> specific description files, from which the menus are generated by
> update-menus package. Update-menus handles those descriptions and produces
> specific configuration file for every installed windowmanager.
> 
> Just port it from Debian... and tell ports maintainers to update their
> files. You need to have such "update-menu" description file - and you need
> to know, which package is a windowmanager, to also generate configuration
> for it.
> 
> Without correct infrastructure it won't work out. Currently, FreeBSD ports
> (and packages) don't provide such meta-information.

That could be done, but what I was thinking more along the lines of is something
that can manipulate the menus of each individual users, by that user. The base
system will include predefined menus, based on what is installed or something to
set them up if something different is choosen.

Something for applying system wide changes could be nice too.

> > 4: Nice X front end to various cli package tools.
> 
> I'd split such task - I mean "GUI configuration tool" - into 2 parts.
> 
> One part would be the server. It would be running on local machine,
> listening on local socket (or tcp/ip), performing authentication and
> specific tasks. Server configuration would be written as an XML file and
> parsed into application-specific entries in /etc and /usr/local/etc.
> 
> 2nd part would be the GUI. You could write then any GUI configuration
> tool you want (ncurses, GTK, Qt, KDE) and administer your machine locally -
> or remotely. If you use GTK or wxWindows to write such client, you could
> even have a GUI configuration tool to run in MS Windows. You could also make
> some PHP frontends and create a web-configuration tool.
> 
> Python seems a correct language to code such task in. Network infrastructure
> would be powered by Twisted Python (www.twistedmatrix.com), GUI would be
> done via py-gtk2.

Out of curiosity, why would this require any server what so ever? That afaik,
would just be a waste of resources.

I personally would love to stay away from xml config files as they are not
pretty to manage from cli.

> Just my $.25
> 
> Regards,
> -- 
> Michal Pasternak :: http://pasternak.w.lub.pl
> Noise to meet you.
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