Re: [RULE] Suggestions for future slinkys

[Paul Nijjar]

On Thu, 1 Apr 2004, Richard Kweskin wrote:

> On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 23:50:23 +0200

        I have not used RULE but have run into some similar problems.
I don't know whether the solutions are of any use to the project.

> >
> > 2) exiting from ICEwm doesn't go back to the shell prompt. To
> > reuse/shutdown the machine I have to reboot/shutdown as root from an
> > xterm inside Icewm
> >
        To shut down from IceWM we used a lousy hack: we made
/sbin/shutdown suid root and then configured IceWM to call /sbin/shutdown
when you select "Shutdown" or "Reboot" from the <ctrl>+<alt>+<delete>
menu.
        This is not the smart way to do this. sudo would be better but we
could not get it working for arbitrary hostnames. You might also be able
to use PAM but I don't know how to do this.

> > snip>
> > 5) The icewm menu is empty. This is a huge problem for newbies, who
> >    have no clues as to what the names of the right command for each
> >    tasks are.

        It would be nice if this could be done automatically. There is a
standard coming up for this but that is not useful unless software
packaged for RedHat implements the standard. If it does then you might
write an IceWM converter that would take these files and convert them to a
format usable by the window manager.

        http://freedesktop.org/Standards/desktop-entry-spec

        Debian has menu entries as part of its policy, and converters that
come with each window manager. Unfortunately the Debian project
(currently) uses its own format for the menu entries, so you cannot just
steal the menu converter from the IceWM package.

> Another unanswered question (in my opinion) is a small app that works as
> easily as kppp without having to have kde or gnome. I use a script but
> this is exactly what I was referring to above!

        We use gkdial, but it only dials PPP connections. It does not set
them up very intuitively (at least not in the old version we use):

http://gkdial.sourceforge.net

- Paul