Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1998 17:10:19 -0700 From: Don Wilde <dwilde1@ibm.net> To: Dan Benjamin <dpb@yeti.hqs.crc.com> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Andreessen: Linux use growing Message-ID: <354912EB.B0194836@ibm.net> References: <004701bd7451$3c025240$6fd392c0@moses.hqs.crc.com>
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Dan Benjamin wrote: > Are we talking about developing an interface (gui or otherwise) to the > existing user-ppp or pppd tools, or something entirely new? > > RedHat has a semi-intuitive ppp setup GUI which works for most setups using > CHAP and PAP checkboxes for options, etc. > An example of a very elegant and intuitive ppp setup we could work towards > is the BeOS. A dialog box asks for the username, password, and telephone > number. It determines server type, PAP or CHAP, etc.- but this would > require some real work. Actually, I was only using those as examples of basic userland things which FreeBSD does very clumsily. I _don't_ want GUI to be a necessity, I would prefer a curses-based front end (at most) like sysinstall. Many of us use FreeBSD for servers and we don't want to have to load X onto the disk at all. Take printers, for example. Admittedly, the bar is now really high because most of us have color inkjets and there are hundreds of variants. What I _want_ is something like apsfilter that doesn't choke if a dependency is not there. For instance, if you don't have a postscript-ready printer, it says, "I hope you've installed ghostscript..." Why doesn't it go out and fetch ghostscript, like our make trees in the rest of the ports tree? Likewise, we need to make a list of the printers which each ghostscript supports, and why you would want one over the other. This should be built into the install script. It then (one at a time, mind you) discovers in succession that you don't have TIFF, XPM, PNG, etc., etc., and dies with each discovery. This is not to say that apsfilter isn't a great start, it's just that it needs to be adapted to fit the fact that the FreeBSD ports tree is right at hand, unlike the other UN*Xes I won't bother naming. Now, I haven't tried the 2.2.6-included version of apsfilter yet, so it's fair to say the author's probably been hard at work like everybody else in freewareland. On ppp, we have a section in the Handbook that deals with server-side ppp. The configs and scripts there deal with testing for both CHAP and PAP. I'm digging into that so I can make a dial-in setup for my server (darn it, kermit isn't in the ports tree any more, gotta fetch it... :| ) at work. It appears that you can actually test the ISP host for either while connecting. It should be a simple matter to save the info in a little file that would then be used to modify the script and config files for the final pass at an installation. Once again, I don't want GUI, unless it is merely a pretty front end to existing scripts. We need to make the scripts exist and be complete _first_ to be true to FreeBSD as it needs to be for those of us who are server admins as well as home users. What we have been discussing on another thread of -advocacy is a bulletproof demo that _is_ made for the home user. My comment was intended to point out that we aren't ready to include printing or ppp in that demo disk, because the ratio of questions to success on -questions is very high on both of those subjects. --> Don To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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