Date: Sat, 13 Apr 1996 17:30:24 +0200 From: Andreas Klemm <andreas@knobel.gun.de> To: barth@di.epfl.ch Cc: current@freebsd.org, hackers@freesbd.org Subject: fvwm95 & taskbar are great, some suggestions Message-ID: <316FC890.41C67EA6@knobel.gun.de>
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Hi David ! I have made a port of fvwm95 for the FreeBSD ports collection. It looks really great. The taskbar works superior. I'd like to have some additional features (if your time permits ;-) It would be fine, if the Mail icon in the taskbar would change if new mail arrives. The beeping should be optional. The nice fvwm config module could perhaps get a section to toggle that. On my first port attempt the mail icon doesn't appear in the TaskBar here, because FreeBSD and some other operating Systems have the mail spool dir in /var/mail. Perhaps you could add here some ifdefs ?! #if defined(__FreeBSD__) || defined(__NetBSD__) || defined(__OpenBSD__) # define .... #else # define #endif It would be great to add an internet push button on the taskbar, to have the possibility to switch internet access off or on. My home FreeBSD System permits on demand dialup PPP. But I don't want to have it on by default and all the time. Therefore I made some shellscripts to turn internet on or off. internet on for example starts ppp (ppp -auto ondemand), starts the harvest cached WWW object cache as proxy server and initiates a uucp conection over TCP/IP to my internet service provider. internet 'off' stops the ppp process. But this works only as root. It would by fine, if one could get such a push button that calls a shellscript that really runs suid root, which makes actually a setuid(0) call and then calls the script. Otherwise it fails. To make only the shellscript suid root by a chmod 4755 isn't sufficient. If one could configure the pushbutton in .fvwm2rc95 to call a shellscript under uid(0) it would be great ... but I think this might get a potential security whole, since then fvwm would need to run suid root ?! Or .... ???? I tried to solve this myself by simply defining a new pushbutton which calls my shellscript 'internet' with the option switch... But it fails, since I'm not really allowed to call a suid root shellscript... (per definition)... I tried a hack, to call a program that does a suid(0) call first and then the internet script ... but I haven't enough programming praxis to make it running perfectly ... Do you have any interest to think about a solution to - turn on or off on demand dialup IP via push button in the TaskBar - to implement an activity LED into taskbar for outgoing lines ? That would be really a must, if I'm going to use an ISDN card, which is build in into the computer and where you don't have a good control about the fact if the card produces online costs or not ... - another good superior idea would be an online phone cost counter for slip, ppp or ISDN devices .... One should talk with each otherm if such a feature would be the effort worth ... and perhaps what the OS already could or should provide, to make this task easier for people like you who implement graphical user interfaces ... I'd like to have more comfortable control about my online costs ... Would that be an interesting feature, that would be the additional effort worth ... ??? Superior would be any kinf of implementation into the Desktop/ taskbar ... aktivity light, that indicate activation or deactivation of the ethernet interface ... flashing leds, when there is ethernet traffic and such ... an running phone cost counter for online time and such... Or the possibility to say $100 and not more in a month .... I write a copy of this to the -current and -hackers mailinglist for general discussion ... These are things I badly miss even in commercial OS's. Windows 95 has a nice feature, that it really shows modem light activity when you are online ! And if you click on the LED's in the taskbar you get a Windows, where the incoming and outgoing traffic is summed up online ... Would be great, if we (FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD) could also do this and even better !!! Andreas /// -- andreas@knobel.gun.de /\/\___ Wiechers & Partner Datentechnik GmbH Andreas Klemm ___/\/\/ $$ Support Unix - aklemm@wup.de $$ pgp p-key http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bal/pks-toplev.html >>> powered by <<< ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/Printing/aps-491.tgz >>> FreeBSD <<<
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