Sabayon Control Center

[micia]

Hi,
first of all I want to make clear that I don't have anything against this project, I am discussing just my personal opinions and suggestions here. If you find it useful you are obviously free to do it the way you want

The idea of making Sabayon more accessible to non-technical users is an idea I also like, it is precisely why I find this project interesting, but having a Control Center which handles something and also having a desktop control center that handles the same thing is a redundancy, even if they don't share the same configuration files. It is actually worse not sharing them, since they will most likely conflict each other making the system more unstable and disorienting a user who won't be able to understand which tool he is supposed to use.

In my opinion there are utilities that would deserve a GUI in Sabayon which are not handled (and will not ever be handled) by Desktop specific control centers, like rc-update, eselect, LiveUSB creation, packages snapshots, BTRFS snapshots and so on, a control center that offers a GUI for such utilities would be extremely useful.
On the other hand duplicating an already existing effort is useless in my opinion, for 3 reasons:
1) the desktop specific utility will most likely do the same thing better, since it integrates itself with the desktop.
2) you know exactly that you are supposed to use that utility, no conflicts will arise, if something is wrong you know where you are supposed to look.
3) the developers can focus on utilities that are not yet available, spending their development time better.

[DanySK]

In my opinion there are utilities that would deserve a GUI in Sabayon which are not handled (and will not ever be handled) by Desktop specific control centers, like rc-update, eselect, LiveUSB creation, packages snapshots, BTRFS snapshots and so on, a control center that offers a GUI for such utilities would be extremely useful.

I agree. Tools replication is pretty bad, new graphical tools for things that currently require the shell are extremely useful instead. In particular a gui for rc-update!

[mélodie]

In my opinion there are utilities that would deserve a GUI in Sabayon which are not handled (and will not ever be handled) by Desktop specific control centers, like rc-update, eselect, LiveUSB creation, packages snapshots, BTRFS snapshots and so on, a control center that offers a GUI for such utilities would be extremely useful.

I agree. Tools replication is pretty bad, new graphical tools for things that currently require the shell are extremely useful instead. In particular a gui for rc-update!

Hi,
I agree with all what both of you said. At same time I have a thought : the people who are coding for this project will not have it achieved in one shot and there are going to be a certain number of test versions, and it will take time.

micia : you said you code in C, (and C++) and I was always told C is interesting because once compiled the binaries are very fast. I also read at the Lxde list (I subscribed some time ago) that C is hard to get straight while coding and is likely to have bugs easily along the coding process. One in one, I think if several people work together on that project, it might be very interesting for the final result (provided they each agrees with the other about who does what of course).

Along the testing process when a first version will be available for test, it might appear that some entry in one Desktop CC might as well be moved to the main Sabayon CC (I think for example to the network configuration tool, which has little chance to be available in Lxde/awesome/xchat ... if not in a common CC. )

[yokmp]

Hi there,

some of you read the first few posts i think.
To the ones which didn't:
I don't want to rewrite stuff. This means i will just call the GUIs which are already there (like kcmshell4 kcm_grub2). (=
Some other tasks need additional packages. Eg. i use 'pastebunz' to upload logs/whatever to pastebin.
So i've written some kind of madmanager to query the packages and install or show some infos if user wants them. I also thinking about to put parts of the code/arrays in an shellscript to let the user add or remove packages without manipulating the source. But im not shure if this is a good idea …

Some words to emerge/eselsct and of course OpenRC:
In a far future there may be some Sulfurish GUI to emerge/eselect but atm its just to much work to do this. If someone wants to write this thing hes welcome.
OpenRC is a part of the SCC.
Atm its just a GUI with buttons which shows a QMessage wich tells you that this button does nothing =P

I already have a base for the Shellmenu. Ive written this years ago because i hated to write the same menucode over and over again. So all i have to do is to write some code to be called by the menu.

Again, if anyone wants to write a GUI for emerge/eselect/rc-* then he/shes welcome (=

[yokmp]

… i mean modmanager but mad describes it too ^^

[yokmp]

I've made a few screenshots and try to upload a preview package this weekend on Sourceforge.
Here is the link:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sabayoncc/

There are may things still unfinished like the XML parser. At the moment it reads compleately from an ini file.
And the only thing that works is the Logfiles- and the GRUB button in the main GUI.

As you (will) see, there is much work to do but it gets a shape. (=

[yokmp]

Hi,

ive uploaded a PreAlpha-Version at https://sourceforge.net/projects/sabayoncc/.
You can't do anything useful except of saving your dmesg output to a file. I will try to add a logging function this week so you can easily paste your bugreports or send them per mail to me.
And maybe ive got enough time to write some more stuff for the xml querying …

As always:
Suggestions and help is welcome (=

[DanySK]

Hi,

ive uploaded a PreAlpha-Version at https://sourceforge.net/projects/sabayoncc/.
You can't do anything useful except of saving your dmesg output to a file. I will try to add a logging function this week so you can easily paste your bugreports or send them per mail to me.
And maybe ive got enough time to write some more stuff for the xml querying …

As always:
Suggestions and help is welcome (=

For the bug reporting, there is a tool which is cookbug (try it with sudo cookbug). We recommend to attach its report to every new bug, and I think you should make your tool use this one instead of directly access dmesg

[chasha420]

Hello...first of all I think that's the most awesome idea ever.

Personally I don't rely on GUI's for configuring my system & I pretty much know most stuff related to Sabayon & prefer the commandline approach when updating, installing stuff, etc..

But, I know a lot of people especially family & friends who got hooked into Linux after seeing & playing around with my system & they still use stuff like Ubuntu / Linux Mint because of it's easy to use interface...but if something like this is implemented in Sabayon I think it'll attract a lot of newbs, some of my cousins lost interest in Sabayon after realising that you'll have to type in a lot of commands to update, search & install new packages & at that time the GUI package manager Sulfur was not really that robust imo...even I had trouble using it.

Anyway long story short...I'm quite interested in developing this on my own (I'm open to working with others aswell if there are volunteers ).

I have a lot of coding experience using scripting language like python & for gui I have experience in WxPython. I also do freelancing work online @ODesk, so my coding skills are imo are upto the standard & I've developed plenty of crossplatform GUI based applications for various clients using Wxpython.

Also the bash commands can be automated using Python itself & we can have a central GUI interface controlling all of that.

Let me know if you guys are interested & think this is worth it then I'll seriously consider putting aside some of my freelance work & start coding it this summer!! (Before college life starts again in 2 months time)

Edit:
Sorry before making my post I didn't know about the project "sabayoncc" & it looks pretty good, but imo since it's being developed in C++...it'll take forever to develop especially since it looks like a one man project. So imo a scripting language might prove to be better suited for this as it will also cut down development time by a big margin...but that's just my opinion.

Good job on that project btw!

[yokmp]

Thanks (=

Unfortuneately SabayonCC isnt developed since about 3 years. So one could say its dead )=

You prefered programming language doesn't matter for me. You can work on your own 'modules' like some kind of openRC manager. This can then be added to the XML file so the SCC can provide it to the user.

The only thing is that you must use the ini file to add/change anything to the xml file. I hope that i have more time to spend on this the next weeks.