Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1999 18:33:52 -0500 (EST) From: "Matthew N. Dodd" <winter@jurai.net> To: "Brian W. Buchanan" <brian@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: A GUI administration tool for FreeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.02.9901071822320.8926-100000@sasami.jurai.net> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9901061610080.4172-100000@smarter.than.nu>
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On Wed, 6 Jan 1999, Brian W. Buchanan wrote: > I've just put up an alpha release of my GUI admin tool for FreeBSD. > I'd appreciate it if some folks could take a look at it and give me > some feedback. Bug reports, comments, suggestions, praise, and > criticism are all very welcome. :) Good stuff! I've been thinking about similar things as I've had to dive into GUI programming @ work. My thought was to use gtk+ and the Gtk Perl module instead of hardcoding stuff in C. If anyone has played with an Irix box and seen their administration tools I think they have a fairly nice visual model. (Items in an icon box). If it would be possible to define a perl module API for automatically registering 'tools' in the 'toolbox' adding bits would be quite easy. One of the big issues with a GUI admin tool is presenting the tools in an organized fashion so that like configuration widgets are grouped. In some cases a tool might corespond directly to a falt config file but in other cases it might be far more involved. Take for example, the password file. Do you present a simple interface for adding users? How do groups fit into the tool? Quotas? Login limits? Authentication? One might punt and only present a 1:1 inteface to /etc/master.passwd, ignoring the others and relegating their configuraitons to other interfaces. For a new user, this sort of GUI may be worse than no GUI at all. Anyhow, everyone probably knows all of this and I"m sure there are much better books on HCI and GUI design so I'll stop adding words to words. Anyone else have any ideas on GUI admin tool layout? -- | Matthew N. Dodd | 78 280Z | 75 164E | 84 245DL | FreeBSD/NetBSD/Sprite/VMS | | winter@jurai.net | This Space For Rent | ix86,sparc,m68k,pmax,vax | | http://www.jurai.net/~winter | Are you k-rad elite enough for my webpage? | To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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