On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Frederic Peters wrote: > > Agreed. If you want to do something USEFUL, write a better webmin, debconf > > or linuxconf module. > - webmin: I think it is useful (and nice) not to have to launch mozilla > to add an user or change a password.
Excuse me? if you don't want to launch a browser (and NOT mozilla thank you... ANY browser, even lynx will (mostly) work), then you should use a command line tool: adduser and passwd are fine for any user who is smart enough to know how. For the rest, a web pointandclick is one of the only interfaces they not only _should_ know how to use, but is also remote controlable easily (yes, true sysadmins can telnet/ssh/remoteX, but we are talking newbies here), so Windows/Mac/whatever users with a Linux server to admin can fix things from a remote machine. Webmin is _really_ well done, and VERY customizable. I have given users access to only certain sections, because that is all I have had time to train them on, and I don't want them messing with other settings. It's secure... it uses ssl if you want. It's supported by a strong mailing list, developers, and outside vendors it's been _packaged_ already. It requires NO httpd, just perl (so it will run on a base-floppies system, without X or anything else) Daniel suggested this list: (a) set up a printer. (b) Add/delete users (c) Install and configure hardware devices and modules (d) Manage fstab and partitions? (e) package management stuff (f) Set up a PPP connection. (g) See available documentation (h) Display network configuration (IP address) as well as modifying it. Every one of these can be done right _now_ by webmin, I believe, with the possible exception of (e), because I think there is an RPM but not a dpkg/apt module. I bet coding an apt-get module would be trivial. The nice thing is that if you want to write a module for it, it's easy. If you do anything Debian specific, great, webmin is smart enough to know the OS it runs on, and will use that module. If you haven't tried webmin, please do. http://www.webmin.com Last time I looked, webmin packages were sitting in incoming, but rejected due to the ssl option (Jaldhar wanted it in main, and James bounced it over the ssl linking). The deb installed fine for me from http://incoming.debian.org/REJECT/ If you want to create a new tool, please _don't_. After trying all of the horrible ones like yast & linuxconf, and installing hundreds of systems for people at LUG meetings, I'm convinced that if you want something that makes sense to new users, just spend your energy improving webmin. Mandrake did. They wanted something that looked nicer, so they created new icons for it and contributed to development (wrote a postfix module among others). Caldera is sponsoring it at this point, also. Instead of creating yet another rift, let's add true Debian support to it. A single frontend makes much more sense than tons of incompatible, non-similar frontends. A non-power user who switches from Mandrake or Caldera or RedHat or whatever to Debian (and I have many at our local LUG who are doing just that...) shouldn't have to learn a whole new frontend, when something like webmin can handle the cross distributional differences, which it can and does well right now. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
