Dan York
Tue, 18 Jan 2000 09:24:51 -0800
linux-cert, This has nothing to do with certification... it's just a personal note... If any of you - or anyone you know - are interested in developing a piece of software to contribute back to the Linux community, or just looking for an interesting programming challenge - here's a place you can help... org charts. They're not a sexy topic.... nothing overly exciting... and, in fact, for a lot of Linux organizations and startups, the very idea of having an organization chart might be foreign... but as Linux expands out into the larger IT world... well... there's a lot of people and companies out there that want to make org charts. I have tried for the last week or so to make an org chart describing the structure of LPI (requested by someone making a presentation to potential sponsors) and to do so with Linux. First I tried with Applixware... and I was able to draw an initial chart - but when I wanted to rearrange and move items around it was a MAJOR headache and I soon gave up. So I started searching http://www.freshmeat.net/ , http://www.linuxapps.com/ and http://metalab.unc.edu/ . I searched for terms like "org chart", "organization chart", "chart", "diagram", "Visio" (after the PC network diagramming software) and came up with only a very few suggestions. One was for KOffice, which I checked into and saw KChart, but was unable to get it all working. (http://koffice.kde.org/kchart/) I had trouble with the download, and perhaps I just need to try it again, but the web site does say it is *pre*-alpha, so I was a bit reluctant to spend too much time on it, especially since the KChart web page said nothing about its capabilities. Another suggestion, which was also supplied from some mailing lists to which I posed the question, was for Dia: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/dia.html Which turned out to be a great tool! It didn't do exactly what I wanted... but I was able to draw boxes, rearrange things, etc., etc. It was working great, and has a great set of features.... I was pleased and excited... And then last night, after 45 minutes of working on it, during which time I was saving the file every 5 to 10 minutes, Dia suddenly died and disappeared completely from my screen. However, what was worse was that somehow the program also *erased* completely the file that I was working on! I spent a significant amount of time using "find" and other tools to try to locate the file and had to conclude that it was gone. So I just shut down my system and went to bed... This morning, not wanting to go through all that again and being under a deadline, I went over to the NT box I have in my office, launched Microsoft PowerPoint, launched the embedded Org Chart tool, designed the whole chart and exported it to a PNG file - all in about 20 minutes. In fairness, PowerPoint has been around for a good number of years now, and the MS developers have had plenty of time to add and improve things... and the world of Linux GUI apps is still quite new... still... it was an annoying setback for my personal desire to use only Linux apps for daily operations. So... if any of you are looking for a way to contribute... here's a place we could definitely use a tool. Whether it's an enhancement to Dia... or KChart... or a completely separate app (heck, I'd even take a non-GUI app that generated a chart off of some type of XML file!) .. whatever... here's a definite hole waiting to be filled! Frustrated in org-chart-land, Dan P.S. If anyone *does* work on such a program, I'll be GLAD to be a beta-tester! -- -------------------------------------------------------- Dan York, Certification Program Manager, Linuxcare, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linuxcare.com/ 1-603-264-0129 mobile, 603-268-0691 tel, 603-268-0103 fax Linuxcare. At the center of Linux. -------------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________________________________________ This message was sent by the linux-cert mailing list. To unsubscribe: echo unsubscribe | mail -s '' [EMAIL PROTECTED]