Hi, The holidays are now over and I spent them showing GNU/Linux systems to NT administrators. Some were as dumb as my old VT320 terminal but most were interested. I showed Debian but also other distributions (that I installed for the first time in most cases) and I have to say that Debian was not the best one to show because they are NT admins after all and have tons of weird ideas about what an OS should be... So they agreed to configure network interfaces with linuxconf, yast or ... but were afraid of our (great) /etc/network/interfaces. That is part 1. Part 2 is last weekend when I explained to a friend how great our alternatives system was and he asked me about the way it works for the user. I told about update-alternatives --config x-window-manager and he didn't like that.
So I drew the conclusion that what Debian needs for those users is simple GUI tools. [some will respond here with "we don't want those users" and I won't agree. This flamewar already happened. GUI tools doesn't mean you have to use them. blah blah blah.] Something else we'd need is an option in the boot floppies that would allow X to be autoconfigured and launched the first time the machine is installed. (but this is beyond the scope of my RFC). So we'd have GUI tools for: - /etc/network/interfaces - alternatives - adduser - ... Technically I thought about: - toolkit: GTK+ (I would rather not use Gnome but that could be an option and the tools could be integrated in the Gnome Control Center) ["QT is now free software" messages to /dev/null, please] - language: C/Perl/Python/... (doesn't matter) - ... I started coding proof of concepts thingies; they should be in my home directory on master (~fpeters/, is this accessible from http ?) soon. There is also a screenshot at http://gaby.netpedia.net/pics/Screenshot_GUI_tools.jpeg Waiting your comments, Frederic PS: the philosophy behind looks like the one used by HelixCode in their future admin tools (to configure SMB shares, resolv.conf, ...) that I don't have tested yet. It would be a good idea to avoid duplicated work. PS2: _don't_ send me copies of your mails. I'm subscribed to debian-devel. -- Frederic Peters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> « Le travail a été ce que l'homme Debian GNU/Linux : http://www.debian.org a trouvé de mieux pour ne rien Gaby : http://gaby.netpedia.net faire de sa vie. » R. Vaneigem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]