[TriLUG] good newbie book

[Brent Fox]

On Wednesday 28 November 2001 02:24 pm, Christian J Hedemark wrote:
> Beth said:
> > It is gone. GNOME has all these config tools in Nautilus now. User
> > Manager (redhat-config-users) is there for linuxconf type things.
>
> Ewwwww.  I know it is tacky for me to criticize Red Hat while I'm openly
> seeking employment there, but this favoritism towards Gnome is another
> turnoff.  When a key component of the OS gets moved to one desktop
> environment, I think that is a Bad Thing.  I know you're not to blame for
> that and I'm not shooting the messenger.
>

Ok, I wrote redhat-config-users, so I am to blame.  :)  I think maybe you 
misunderstood Beth's post.  You can use Nautilus to browse the config tools, 
but you can also use the GNOME or KDE menus.  You can also use KDE Control 
Panel to browse them.  The point is that the config tools can be run in 
whatever destop you choose.  There is no Gnome favoritism.  We employ Gnome 
hackers; we employ KDE hackers.  During the install, you get to choose which 
desktop you'd like.  What's wrong with this?

> Linuxconf had something going for it in that you could run it from a VT100
> console, xterm, any X Windows environment, web interface, etc.  Requiring
> Gnome or a subset of Gnome to be installed to use a core system tool is
> sort of, well, a downgrade in features from where I sit.

Well, Linuxconf didn't have *anything* else going for it.  So we wrote the 
config tools with Python, using GTK and Glade to create the interfaces.  Some 
of the more useful widgets from glade require that certain PyGnome libs be 
installed.  Whatever toolkit we choose (GTK or QT) will imply some kind of 
desktop favoritism, but we had to choose something.

The only way to not show any "favoritism" with the core system tools would be 
to write the interfaces with newt or Tk (the horror).  Well, many newt config 
tools exist for the console-only folks, but we're trying to get away from Tk 
(I think we have, now that the old timetool was replaced).

Why did we choose GTK?  Because we employ most of the core GTK hackers.  Is 
that Gnome favoritism?  No, it's just smart because they can fix any problems 
that we come across. 


Cheers,
   Brent