Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik Sun COM>]

On Wed, 31 Oct 2001, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> On 31Oct2001 12:10PM (+0000), Sander Vesik wrote:
> > On 31 Oct 2001, Seth Nickell wrote:
> > 
> > > For a large class of users, the desktop environment is the most
> > > fundamental object they interact with, the desktop environment is what
> > > holds their operating system together. When the graphical environment
> > > fails to provide a good experience for the user, I think the final
> > > burden rests with the desktop (perhaps the distribution can share this
> > > as well, but as a desktop developer I choose to treat this as my
> > > responsibility as well). If there's something missing that's needed, or
> > > whatever, the desktop is the primary mediator of the user experience.
> > > That's all I'm saying.
> > > 
> > 
> > This is not true for the "traditional" unix desktop market. 
> 
> True, most workstation users know whether they are running HP-UX or
> Solaris, even though both may be using CDE.
> 
> But the reuslting fact that many tasks must be done differently on the
> two is not seen as a good thing.
> 

Part of the "have to be done differently" comes from what you could call
CDE forking - ls /usr/dt/bin/sdt* | wc -l give me the result of 49 (out of
128, so its almost 40%), and as i understand it, these are not common cde
programs but specific to Sun.

These include the likes of stdaudio(control), sdtfontadm, sdtfind,
sdtimage, etc. 

> > Users configuring the system? who could think of something so gross? The
> > users have no call to be managing the system, at best they might be
> > allowed to set their mouse and keyboard and sounds settings... 8-)
> 
> How about (on corporate centrally managed desktop systems):
> 

Well, this really largely applies to anything but SOHO desktops and home
desktops. For anything larger, system configuration is what sysadmins do.
Unless the user really wants to muck around. In which case they can
probably still do it (at least to some extent) even on a centrally managed
desktop.

> * Power management settings
> * Display resolution and color depth

yes, you would probably change general desktop (esp. GUI) specific things
8-)

> * Installing I/S approved software or upgrades
> 

That probably comes automagicly from a NFS server. Or possibly several NFS
servers. 

> Or on a laptop:
> 
> * Network settings

dhcp or similar magic

> * Date & time

yes, probably.

> 
>  - Maciej
> 

	Sander

"I don't think there is intelligent life within our solar system"
	-- Brian Behlendorf