[NCLUG] gdm funkiness

Mike Loseke mike at verinet.com
Tue Dec 18 09:55:29 MST 2001


Thus spake Matthew Wilcox:
> 
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 09:07:50AM -0700, Mike Loseke wrote:
> > Both Sun Solaris and
> > HP-UX have a common interface/environment by default (CDE) which is very
> > close to identical across machines. CDE takes less than 1% of our support
> > time because of this. These vendors, and more, worked together several
> > years ago to make that a reality as some here may recall.
> 
> maybe that's because it's so unusable by default that everyone sets up
> their own customised desktop and doesn't call you?

 This only happens with a very small number of users. I have one or two
people who still use the default openwin environment, a couple that use
fvwm2 and everyone else uses CDE. Most everyone uses CDE including all the
users that connect via XDMCP via exceed or like windows X software.

 I don't think it's unusable at all, really. Everything works... I'm not
sure how that's unusable. Sure, dtterm sucks compared to xterm, and all
the apps have that fat motif feel but it's common and new users plop right
in and ask things like "where are my 3rd party EDA tools and the data for
me to use" instead of "how do I open a new shell?".

 These users are, for the most part, the EE flavor of engineer. They do
real work and aren't generally concerned with the look and feel of the
windowing manager. There are actually very few of them that make any changes
to the default settings, like colors and number of desktops. They are more
concerned with working than farting around tweaking wm settings.  This is
why I'm primarily concerned with a config that "just works" because that's
what my users expect.

-- 
   Mike Loseke    |
 mike at verinet.com | A sharp stick and a wet-nap.



More information about the NCLUG mailing list