Fedora Linux

[Marcus Brubaker]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 15:22, JoeHill wrote:
> On Wed, 05 Nov 2003 15:15:30 -0500
> David J Patrick <davidjpatrick-rieW9WUcm8FFJ04o6PK0Fg at public.gmane.org> uttered:
> 
> > A central, intelligent and (ablove all) GUI way to handly the
> > otherwise arcane system variables.
> 
> Webmin should do tha trick there, mate. You would not believe the many
> and varied tools available through this wondrous interface.
> 
> Does Apache, User management, Postfix, sets cron jobs, whatever you
> want.

As a techie I whole-hearted agree here.  Webmin is a beautiful package
(although I could really wish they had chosen a better front end than
http) but would fail miserably for what I think David was after. 
Marketing to desktop users means marketing to people who aren't likely
to want to configure apache, postfix, bind, sendmail or any of the other
dozens of packages webmin supports.  They want things like "what devices
are connected", "how do i configure my network connection", "where do I
change the default screensaver", "where can I configure my proxies" and
other such things.

I think a really promising package along these lines is the combination
of the GNOME Control Center (since around 2.4) and Gnome System Tools. 
In some ways the jury is still very much out with respect to GST.  "Just
working" with each distribution is not an easy task, especially when you
have the lofty goal of not destroying the config files or running a
parallel "configuration database" (a la the well intentioned, but
ill-fated linuxconf).

I may be diverging a bit here, but this is sadly a really hard problem
to solve.  For one, I don't think most vendors want it solved. 
Easy-to-use, well integrated system configuration is something that
vendors are well positioned to do and can easily distinguish themselves
with.  Beyond that you have a whole crowd of UNIX purists that will
scream bloody murder if you try to overhaul linux/unix system
configuration in a coherent and modern way.  (Albeit, there is
definitely a lot of validity in the argument that the current config
system (ie, none/ad hoc text files) works so don't fix it.)  So even if
the vendors *did* want to work on standardizing these things (through
the LSB or some such) they risk pissing off a good contingent of users
and getting to keep both pieces of a stillborn standard.  (And we all
know how many of those there are....)

Enough rambling for now.  Back to my parallel computation homework...

-- 
Marcus Brubaker <marcus.brubaker-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org>

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