Sabayon Control Center

[yokmp]

Hi,

we had a little conversation on the Sabayon Facebookpage about a Controlcenter like the one from Mandriva/Mageia.
The main Argument for a SCC is the use for newbies. That means if they will benefit from a GUI to maintain the system or will this thing prevent them from learning Linux/Sabayon.

At the moment we think a GUI interface which reflects the commands in Bash would be best for this. So newbies see which command is for what problem and so they can adapt it to the terminal.
The next point was the language in which it should be programmed. Here we use QT because its shipped with Gnome and other GTK based Desktops (and ofcourse KDE) by Sabayon. The use of QT is that anyone can easily translate the GUI and redesing is easier than in PyQt or similar lang.

The code itself will be written in Bash (for the early stage). So we can redesign the GUI quickly and new functions can be easily written in Bash. Maybe its not needed to translate the bashscripts to QT? Time will see ...

Now the question is if there is interest in such a GUI and are there people who will help?
And how we will communicate …
Next thing is which functions should be included and what design is the best chioce fot the GUI?

p.s. excuse my bad englich (=

[Fitzcarraldo]

I have a distinct sense of déjà vu here. Let me see... Ah, yes: Configuration Tool. Forum members Stupot and sjieke started one some time ago. I wonder what happened?

[Stupot]

haha, I was just about to start commenting.

It pretty much fell by the wayside because, as much as people think they would want such a tool, it is actually very challenging to figure out what things should be included in such a tool. And, despite the fact that I know how to program just dandy, I didn't know what to include.

Most DE's provide configuration GUIs to modify how things should work in that particular DE, and they tend to cover everything in a pretty unified (for the DE) way. I personally like using the DE utilities instead of a one-size-fits-all-DE-config GUI.

A word of advice: if you do plan on working on this tool (by no means let my previously failed project stop you)
Make sure you have one person who is really driving it. Collaboration is fine, but you really need to have one person who is simply 'in charge' of the project.

P.S. I do think the hardest part of the project will be figuring out what you should be including the in the SCC. Before starting, I suggest really analyzing what you think you can do better than what DEs already provide. As great as a unified SCC sounds, it simply might not be worth the development time, not to mention the maintenance time as underlying aspects change.

P.P.S. It's all fine and dandy to use a qt GUI frontend to make calls to bash. I just wanted to make sure you understand that those are two different things. You can't have a qt GUI written in bash (unless there has been some magical development I haven't heard about...always possible).

Good luck!

[yokmp]

I know it won't be an easy task and i often thought about what to include. So first step to take will be an rc-update GUI. This is one of the basics i think. As you know there are thousands of things which can be changed. Started by simple scripts to more advanced settings. So this GUI will be focus on things like the OpenRC system at the moment.

If a GUI is already available then there is no need to write a second one. Its maybe better to call this one out of the SCC(?)
Maybe the 'sabutil' could be included, cloned just used to gather Logfiles and play around with the config files.
But thats should be discussed elsewhere and (much) later.

A few words to the bashscripts:
They are fast written and can be changed in seconds without the need to even touch the GUI (more or less).
And yes i know i can't write a Qt GUI in bash

I won't include things like appearance settings and such because there is already a GUI for them in every DE. Maybe 'like Mandriva/Mageia' leads to missunderstand the goals of this project.

I'll write this thing even if there isn't any need or support for this because i can ^^

[greywalk]

- I'd add changing the host name into the CC (instead of this http://wiki.sabayon.org/index.php?title ... e_hostname)

[Fitzcarraldo]

yokmp, not that I want to dampen your enthusiasm but it would be easier and quicker to have a go at porting the Mandriva/PCLinuxOS Control Centre (Drakconf) to SL. In starting from scratch, Stupot and sjieke were trying to do what it took several people a lot of time and effort to do for Mandriva. A lot of man-hours must have gone into Drakconf over quite some time. To try and create a comprehensive, debugged control centre from scratch is a big undertaking. SL user xlnagla was able to get Drakconf more or less running in SL relatively quickly (see Re: Configuration Tool). In my opinion you'd be more likely to achieve your goal if you adapt and build onto an application that is already available for exactly the role you are proposing. The look of it could be modified to match the SL image, hen's foot logo and all. You could then add any additional functionality that you, or other SL users, suggested. Just my tuppence worth.

[greywalk]

as a person from the SL FB page suggested, "sabayon doesn't have normal gui tool to work with grub". so this might be another thing to add to the GUI Control Center

[mélodie]

Hi,
I use PCLinuxOS. The PCC has been adapted from MCC, and is written in perl. Would that be suitable for Sabayon ? Else, I can see that new programs in PCLinuxOS which would have a place there are not added to the Control Center. I am not sure why, perhaps it is much work... Wouldn't the devel team at Sabayon take the time to think of a gui which could benefit from evolutions easily and maybe dynamically ? Unfortunately I have no coding knowledge, but if I can help for instance with testing, translating, in the future, I will.

Just an idea thrown in the air : Gnome also provides a gui with the entries to several configuration applications. It's more or less a matter of organising in one unique gui the presentation of entries such as desktop files : isn't that right ?

[mélodie]

I forgot to say that it launches a large list of programs also written in Perl AFAIK, which also are all available in console with "drak*" and drakx*" commands, display a ncurse blue text mode...

Is there a list of the programs used and needed to configure all and everything in Sabayon, such as ?

* hardware detection
* sound (Alsa | Pulseaudio)
* video (Xorg)
* effects (3D)
* printer
* scanner
* firewall
* file sharing
* network and internet
* local network
* system
* manage users and groups
* manager services to be started on the fly or at boot
* boot loader : reinstall, add or remove boot stanzas...
* login setup (gdm/kdm/lxdm) : start with or without...

...

[yokmp]

I know the MCC very well but there are some problems for me:
At first i cant write Perl …
The second is that it is simply to much work to adapt the code there plus learning Perl for one person (me, unfortuneately) …
Third thing is that the MCC does things which are mostly done by stuff from the DEs. EG Networkmanagement, Audio, Appearance etc pp.

This is why i decided to build a 'clone' of Gnomes control center. At the moment i try to figure out how to design the
rc-config/update/etc GUI to be userfriendly but also provide some sort of learning effect to the user. Target is that the user doesn't need the GUI after some work with it.

To GRUB(2)
You can enter [ALT]+[F2] "GRUB2-Bootloader" … But i don't know atm if this is a KDE only thing /=
Alternatively try out https://launchpad.net/grub-customizer which provides similary stuff.

But thanks for your response! (=