Debian Control Center
What is Debian Control Center?
One of the biggest problems with new/desktop users of Linux is their capacity to configure a system, how to deal with proper stuff to have a installation working soon. Debian, being a distribution with high quality assurance standards and being completely free, let users freedom of usage, but probably a not very intuitive way to set it up. Because of the absence of a proper tool to do this, dcontrol project aims to fit this needs.
We need to provide good graphical user interface for configuration of already existing debconf infrastructure and use debconf where possible, only providing special code to configure stuff where debconfization is not possible.
The reason to create one from the scratch is to set up a complete native system with Debian, developed by and for Debian community.
dcontrol will use debconf as backend for configuration and implement its own parsers for anything not yet debconfinizated.
dcontrol thoughts
Main ideas were thrown on the IRC meeting: http://www.damog.net/debian/debian-control-center.log
dcontrol will be available in probably five ports:
- GTK+ port.
- Qt port.
- Java port.
- CLI (written in C/C++) port.
- Web-based (written in Perl) port.
- Hack gnome-system-backends to be able to talk with debconf from any toolkit or language.
dcontrol will be able to perform configuration for normal user as well as system user.
dcontrol should be able to share virtual configurations, a common configuration for any kind of service.
dcontrol could be able to configure desktop preferences for any kind of desktop/wm and be able to share it between them.
dcontrol could be able to speak with other d-bus desktop applications, in order to retrieve relevant information to use it as User Preferences.
dcontrol should be able to work and set mount points up automagically, using desktop autofs.
dcontrol may be able to handle removable media access over an X extension
dcontrol will be able to set runlevels up with gnome-system-tools or rcconf
debconf will be the tool used to interact with the Debian system.
dcontrol suggestions
- configlets should be hacked to use it as frontend.
- the gnome system tools backends should be used for any system related task, these backends are desktop independent (regardless of their frontends being tied to GNOME, as a working example there is knetworkconf, a KDE tool that uses the network backend), their output is XML easily parseable from any language, they support Debian from a long time ago and the are being actively developed. The short/med term plan is to propose the backends to Freedesktop once they reach 1.0 (the first RC was released today)
How can I help?
First, thanks
- Writing your suggestions on this wiki.
- Right now code work is appreciate it in any port.
- Studying debconf as the main backend.
- Helping coordinating this mess.
- Joining debian-desktop mailing list and help with the subproject.
- With graphic design and art.
Alioth Project
Over here: https://alioth.debian.org/projects/dcc/ Feel free to drop me an email (damog@damog.net) in order to add you.