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Control Center -- Does it matter or not?


yochenhsieh
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Ahh... the original point was whether or not Control Centers are needed. In the process of saying "yes", some are now trying to explain why it is a difficult task. I never said it was easy; it is nevertheless essential. But introducing the notion that a Control Center somehow goes against GPL is absurd! And suggesting that commercial distros are somehow faulty because they have Control Centers is preposterous! :lol: That is all a lot of geek-talk. ;)

 

Yes, the lack of standards in linux does make the task of a functioning Control Center challenging. Is a COntrol Center exclusive to Micronobules? I don't think so. Microsoft neither invented the gui nor did they invent gui tools. They have, however, made major conceptual advances in the use of gui, which the average user likes! Sure, we can have esoteric conversations about capitalism and anti-capitalism, and we could argure about whether or not anyone should be allowed to use a gui in linux. We could probably spend pages doing that. But the bottom line is that gui is here for the average user, and average people will use a gui where they won't use CLI. Linux is ready to go beyond us geeks, if we will do it.

 

We are the ones that hold back linux by insisting it remain geekish. Let's have a geek discussion about that! :lol2:

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My question still stands about what exactly is a control centre?

 

I don't see how we can discuss if a control centre is needed until its defined.

 

If we take the definition of the MS control centres then these are compiled binary modules ....

 

If we take the MCC then we are looking at a lot of PERL scripts with a 'look n feel'?? .... other distro's do other things... Kanotix uses the KDE CC since its a KDE distro.... but where other things are needed as GUI tools Kano adds them to the KDE CC or the Kanotix menu.....

 

So is the kanotix config menu a CC???? it runs wizards for everything from wifi config to samba and terminal server etc.

 

whilst we are asking what is a CC what about say fnfxd or synaptics CC';s?

fnfxd controls the ACPI functions of toshiba laptops.... should this be a CC module or is a script launching it close enough....?? synaptics tablet drivers have a KDE CC module for config ...

We could probably spend pages doing that. But the bottom line is that gui is here for the average user, and average people will use a gui where they won't use CLI.

AS I HAVE REPEATEDLY STATED

GUI TOOLS !=CONTROL CENTRE

There are hundreds of GUI config tools specific to applications.... K3B for instance has its opwn GUI config as does xine .... and hundreds of other packages....

 

We are not discussing the presence or absense of a GUI we are discussing the presence or absence of a control centre ... yet what a control centre is has not been defined. Once its defined we can perhaps ask what it should control? Should a control centre contain optional components like apache or sendmail?

 

 

But introducing the notion that a Control Center somehow goes against GPL is absurd!

Why is it absurd ... ?? but more importantly WHERE did I state it goes against the GPL???

 

In many cases the commercial distro's ARE breaking the GPL.... many of the GUI config tools mandriva deliberatly cripples or breaks are part of the package "which should be distributed whole"...

 

However this is not the point I am raising....

The point I'm raising is commercial distro's are not going to get the actual application developers to give their time writing a control centre module for a commercial distro especially when they can write modules for the Gnome CC or KDE CC. But it goes a level deeper than this because Mandriva actually cripple the KDE CC by taking out parts that duplicate the MCC so there wouldn't be any motivation to write a standard module if the CC is already deliberatly crippled ..... and at the same time there is no motivation for mandriva or SUSE to accept a standard which is not theirs since they use their CC's as "distinguishing features" of their distro.....

 

This is the same as themes I guess when people write themes but can't get rid of the mandriva start star..... you have to be a major mandriva freak to write them specially for mandriva due to their messing about with the whole themes and icons stuff.... instead most people write themes for KDE or Gnome and if it doesn't quite work right in Mandriva well tough.... however unlike themes actual applications are crippled by lack of real configuration options ... for instance when shorewall is used for ICS....

 

Windows control centre is no different ... many graphics,wifi, sound cards etc have CC modules and these constantly interfere with the Windows native ones....

 

i.e. You install the wifi card and it adds its own Wifi browser to the CC which then prevents the windows one having control.... YOu can pretty much see this on any DELL centrino laptop .... or installing CD writers and SW interferes with the Windows settings....

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If I was the maintainer I would gladly GIVE it to FREE as in beer distros BUT I would NEVER GIVE IT to commercial ones..... it undermines the whole point of making it FREE in the 1st place.

 

If I was developing a commerical quality app to GIVE AWAY I personally would concentrate on FREE as in beer distro's...and if someone wants to SELL my work then they can damned well pay ME before i make even the smallest effort towards helping them... indeed I would not even return emails from a commercial distro except to say "you want me to work on your commercial distro then you pay me"

 

 

Then you shouldn't be licensing it under GPL.

 

If you think this way, you don't get the 'free as in speech' part of the GNU philosophy, nor the things that make Richard Stallman tick.

 

There's no middle ground. Check the 4 freedoms.

 

(I know that you, Gowator, knew that, but I'm just adding it for all those others... ;) )

 

Back to the CC issue...

 

Yes it's needed, yes I find the MCC doing its job fine, no I don't have big issues with it, yes I use it to do those things that have always 'just worked' for me with it: printer sharing, networking, scanner sharing (wouldn't even know how to do that from the command line, what files are involved etc...) and then some.

No, it's not been without trouble, but it is atm.

 

I am certainly capable of figuring things out without the MCC or other CC in other distros, but for many tasks it works fine.

 

Lastly, for breaking in into the desktop space, CCs are really required.

Whether you want Linux to succeed there is up to you, .... for long term 'security' it is in any case a good thing if more people use Linux - less chances to be cut off / put aside.

To me, the more people using Linux, the better.

 

Then again, don't hasten people who aren't ready. It takes time and effort, no matter from what system one changes to what, even with the best CC.

And I still find there are plenty of people ready and willing to take the plunge and make it work, so I don't push people to Linux at all. If they have a look at my 3d desktop and are really impressed, all the better...

:)

 

In many cases the commercial distro's ARE breaking the GPL.... many of the GUI config tools mandriva deliberatly cripples or breaks are part of the package "which should be distributed whole"...

 

 

No, they distribute the source in whole of what they are shipping. Nowhere does it say (luckily!!!) that they have to distribute the whole original source that they base their code on.

 

Imagine the protection: just adding a few terabytes of garbage (extended text) to your code to make sure anyone distributing it will be killed by bandwidth issues.

 

 

As to what is a CC....

 

Just take a deep breath and think what a newbie would consider a control center, not what you are discussing semantically or otherwise.

 

The original question is relatively easy, just take it in the first, main, sense.

 

Let me try to express this in my own words:

whenever a newbie can go into the menu / click an icon on the desktop / on the panel and have a window show up, from within which said newbie can configure 'stuff' on his machine, then this is a control center, as opposed to having various graphical applications to configure the various parts, or using the command line or gui text editors entirely.

 

At least, that's how I took the meaning of it, and that's how I answered it.

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If I was the maintainer I would gladly GIVE it to FREE as in beer distros BUT I would NEVER GIVE IT to commercial ones..... it undermines the whole point of making it FREE in the 1st place.

 

If I was developing a commerical quality app to GIVE AWAY I personally would concentrate on FREE as in beer distro's...and if someone wants to SELL my work then they can damned well pay ME before i make even the smallest effort towards helping them... indeed I would not even return emails from a commercial distro except to say "you want me to work on your commercial distro then you pay me"

 

 

Then you shouldn't be licensing it under GPL.

 

 

aRTee, what I'm saying is though I might as an opensource developer or part of a team develop a GUI tool I'm not going to spend my time developing CC modules for each distro.... if I am going to make ANY CC type module it would be for a FREE as in beer distro.... or go into a multidistro CC like Gnome or KDE....

 

In other words Mandriva and Suse etal. can make their own.... UNLESS they want to pay for the development of a specific CC module for their CC. There is no reason they should expect a developer of say a DVD ripping program to write a special CC interface for mandriva and another for suse and another for mepis.

 

When you think about this if you have written a nice config tool why would you spend time writing one specifically for someone else to sell when they refuse to use the one you already wrote?

 

If you think this way, you don't get the 'free as in speech' part of the GNU philosophy, nor the things that make Richard Stallman tick.

 

There's no middle ground. Check the 4 freedoms.

 

(I know that you, Gowator, knew that, but I'm just adding it for all those others... ;) )

Authors are free to stipulate that the original code must be distrubuted intact. (including copyright notiices and credits etc.) and this can (and in many cases is extended to the config tools which are part of the package....)

 

 

Back to the CC issue...

 

Yes it's needed, yes I find the MCC doing its job fine, no I don't have big issues with it, yes I use it to do those things that have always 'just worked' for me with it: printer sharing, networking, scanner sharing (wouldn't even know how to do that from the command line, what files are involved etc...) and then some.

This is exactly the point I keep trying to make

 

GUI CONFIG tools != CC.

You don't need to set this up from the CLI....

You can choose from

quiteinsane (Qt) , Xsane (GTK+)

 

I'm not saying they should only be done from the CLI.... I'm saying GUI tools already exist to do this.

 

and incidentally the printer config and sharing can be done from the KDE CC.... so long as its the complete KDE CC not a stripped down version!

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OK. I agree that the term "Control Center" means "GUI Tools." At least I think that htis is how the average user thinks about it. (Am I average anymore?) I also think that there are many gui tools in existence already that come with a given desktop/environment/program. I think that centralizing access to these is the other aspect to "Control Center."

 

And the point about windows wireless networking running/not running one's network card is precisely my point. Linux could move ahead on this avenue. A secret to fixing wireless in windows is allowing windows to run the wireless card! :lol: But the same sort of battle ensues with Mandriva and its custom modules conflicting with existing modules in KDE, for example. It seems reinventing is a problem in commercial distros.

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Authors are free to stipulate that the original code must be distrubuted intact. (including copyright notiices and credits etc.) and this can (and in many cases is extended to the config tools which are part of the package....)

 

No, they can't. They can stipulate that for any piece of the code that a new package includes, their credits and copyright is mentioned, but they cannot afaict stipulate that their whole code must be distributed intact. That is what GPL code is all about: use what you need, but make your _changes_ available.

So if you rip 10k lines from a 200k line program, you can just use that, and include that in your new source that you must share if you distribute the program containing the 10k lines to some external party.

 

 

 

Back to the CC issue...

 

Yes it's needed, yes I find the MCC doing its job fine, no I don't have big issues with it, yes I use it to do those things that have always 'just worked' for me with it: printer sharing, networking, scanner sharing (wouldn't even know how to do that from the command line, what files are involved etc...) and then some.

This is exactly the point I keep trying to make

 

GUI CONFIG tools != CC.

You don't need to set this up from the CLI....

You can choose from

quiteinsane (Qt) , Xsane (GTK+)

 

I'm not saying they should only be done from the CLI.... I'm saying GUI tools already exist to do this.

 

and incidentally the printer config and sharing can be done from the KDE CC.... so long as its the complete KDE CC not a stripped down version!

 

 

Yeah, the reason Mdv don't do it this way is obvious: they are a DE agnostic system - even though Mdv defaults to KDE, you can install and run it without KDE (or without most of it), and _still_ have MCC fully functional.

 

In any case, the question was about the CC, regardless if there are seperate GUIs to get the same thing done. So just answer that question.

My answer, still, is that yes, for larger adoption there should be a single entry GUI (CC) for system configuration.

Due to the way Linux works (layer on layer on layer) I think that there should be a CC for the DE/WM as well, it would be nice to have it integrated into the system CC, but to me that is not required - it would be nicer, but I don't see that as a major barrier.

Feel free to disagree and explain why.

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