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Re: Webmin works... was Re: RFC: GUI tools for common Debian admin tasks



Seth Cohn wrote :
> On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Frederic Peters wrote:
> >  - 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.
> [rest of webmin description skipped]
ok I shouldn't have talked about mozilla. But I'm not talking about ME
here. I know how to configure my network, add an user or whatever
we're talking about. [and I already used webmin]

This is about the guy who installed Debian for a non-technical reason
(_I_ choosed Debian over other distribs because it was the non-commercial
one and I expect that some new users choosed it for the same reason).
And we should do our best to help those persons be happy with Debian.

I don't think webmin is the perfect answer because I have no idea about
the way to integrate it nicely on a desktop. If Jaldhar manage to do
this: great! but I still have doubts.

> 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.  
Even if I thought webmin was the panacea I wouldn't be able to do it because
of Perl.

> 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.
Are there volunteers to add true Debian support to webmin ?

-- 
Frederic Peters <fpeters@swing.be>        « Le travail a été ce que l'homme
Debian GNU/Linux : http://www.debian.org     a trouvé de mieux pour ne rien
Gaby : http://gaby.netpedia.net              faire de sa vie. »  R. Vaneigem


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