[Mageia-discuss] Mageia First Login Wizzard

[Juergen Harms]

I have been wanting such a feature for a long time and have quite a bit 
played around with possible approaches.

I agree with many things said

- Such a tool can substantially shorten the time needed for customizing 
an out-of-the-box system.

- A tool is better implemented as an pure application - outside of the 
framework of the core programs of a specific distro (I tried the 
toy-tools I had made also on, for instance) - so "doing something" is 
not necessarily tied to Mageia-1.

- As to the list of items mentioned by Luc, there are three groups: OS 
customisation (for instance customizing files such as /etc/hosts or 
/etc/rsyncd.conf), application customisation (examples from Luc) and 
desktop customisation. OS customisation essentially is applying scripts 
- easy to do. Application customisation requires working on support 
files of the applications (such as .libreoffice/1/user/gallery) - less 
easy (often the use of template files is a good approach), desktop is 
essentially like applications but still more complicated - taking the 
example of the configuration files of kde4 illustrates that complicated 
may mean messy.

- I have done some prototype building - essentially I ended up with a 
GUI in support of 2 different types of tools - user controlled execution 
of scripts, and plugins for tools for specific tasks - such as editing 
the boot menu. That is a toy, but it allows to get a feeling for the 
problem, and - maybe - pieces of code could be used. You can have a look at
   ftp://ftp.mandrivauser.de/magazin/MagDriva-2.2010.pdf
(page 41 and on - it is in German, but the screenshots illustrate quite 
well how such a tool can look like). I dont suggest to use this in reply 
to Lucs suggestion - I propose to use it as a potential starting  point 
in case of an "ok, I will write this piece of code" . And, I dont think 
that "I will" is the right approach, there need to be more than 1 - not 
only to split the work, but also to have controversy and discussions 
about what the gadget should look like.