[Mageia-discuss] Mageia First Login Wizzard

Lucas.Betschart at crypto.ch Lucas.Betschart at crypto.ch
Fri Feb 25 13:56:18 CET 2011


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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.

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Nice worke, but the GUI looks realy ugly on the screenshots :p.. I don't like Tk.

I was thinking about a less technical tool. For common user who just wants to configure the standard things we all do when setting up a new system/account.

For a new tool I would use Perl/Gtk, because then one could use some MCC modules e.g. for adding printers.

My perl skills are ok, but I got no Gtk experince, just ugly Tk. But if some people (you? and others?) are interested in making such a tool/wizzard, we could discuss more details on a new ML maybe.


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