KDE, GUIs for newbiews (was Re: [CLUG] Microsoft's failings/network monitoring)

[Donncha O Caoimh]

I've been playing with KDE 2 the past week or so and I compiled it again
last night and launched "start-kde" which brought up the nice new KDE
panel and desktop (not much different really, just looks nicer)
What did pop up this time though was a nice "Welcome to KDE"
banner-program much like the "Welcome to Windows" thing that first pops
up when you install Windows. Thankfully this actually did something
useful though.
After admiring the great graphics of Kandalf the wizard and some other
cartoon character I can't remember it asks you to name the devices of
your removable media. fd0, fd1 and cdrom are already picked so all you
need to do is click on 3 icons to create those icons on the desktop.
Presumably, it's a simple step towards setting "mount" setuid root so
normal users can mount those devices, or even better when supermount
(think autofs on steroids:) gets more exposure and widespread use
outside of Mandrake Linux.
Clicking "Quit" at the end of the setup was a bit alarming though. I'd
rather the usual "Finish" button myself..

Donncha.


Peter Flynn wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, Paul wrote:
> > For user-mounting you need to add lines to /etc/fstab with special options
> 
> Yes, but my point was that KDE setup should do this by itself. If they
> want to make it attractive to the end user, who may not be a Unix
> user of long standing, then they have to make this path smoother.
> 
> > Only root can mount devices.  The permissions on devices should always be
> > 660; "other" should never have access.
> 
> Quite, the app should be capable of setuid root to do this. My point is
> that on a single-user laptop, an interface like a GUI which leaves the
> FDD and CDD inaccessible to the non-root user is just badly designed.
> 
> > I don't like KDE, but this is not in general a KDE-specific issue.
> 
> The specific question was, because it's one of the unevennesses I don't
> like, but you're right, it has more general application. There is still
> a considerable conflict between the makers of GUIs, who want them to be
> user-friendly "just like Windows" <sigh/> and the designers and
> programmers they hand development to, who are out of touch with the
> "real world" of the very end-users the makers wish to target.
>