On 4/18/07, Ritesh Khadgaray <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 02:14 +0530, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I am working on enhancing some of the "deployment friendly" stuff in
> > GNOME as a part of my Google SoC, and one of the things I am working
> > on is support for predefined global items on the desktop. To make my
> > current goal clearer, here's a sample use case (stolen shamelessly
> > from a doc by my mentor, Federico Mena Quintero).
> >
> > ** BEGIN **
> > Carlos has set up an internal wiki for the dinosaur park, so that
> > scientists can have a central place to log information about their
> > projects. Say a researcher does voyeurism in the name of science, and
> > finds out how stegosauruses manage to mate while avoiding hurting each
> > other with their sharp armored plates. The researcher will then want
> > to enter this data in the park's internal wiki, so that someone else,
> > who investigates the gestation of land-based dinosaurs, can access
> > this data.
> > The problem Carlos has is that researchers can never remember the URL
> > of that wiki. He even tried to make it the default web page to be
> > shown on people's browsers, but they kept complaining that they
> > preferred to use boingboing.net instead. Carlos has decided that he
> > will put an icon on people's desktops, which they can double-click to
> > launch a browser and show the park's wiki.
> > Similarly, Carlos wants to have some icons on the desktop which people
> > can use to launch commonly-used programs. Nautilus supports showing
> > icons for desktop entries, but there is no way to configure them
> > centrally (except for maybe using Sabayon to predefine specific items,
> > but that's not a very elegant solution).
> > There needs to be a way for the administrator to install desktop
> > entries (".desktop files") that are used by Nautilus on user's
> > desktops, in addition to what users may put in their own ~/Desktop
> > directories. That is, we need to have support for global desktop items
> > in Nautilus.
> > ** END **
> >
> > The way I propose for going forward with this is to have a gconf key
> > (/apps/nautilus/desktop/global_item_dir maybe?) which would contain a
> > directory path (say /etc/nautilus/globals ) and this directory would
> > contain all the .desktop files to be displayed as _read only_
> > launchers/links/whatever in the relevant user's Desktop.
> > Desktop admins would be able to predefine these items by using a small
> > application (to be integrated with Sabayon, just like Pessulus) which
> > I am working on. The mockup of the main application window is
> > available at http://sayamindu.randomink.org/soc/images/lockdown_mockup.png
> > The add button will pop a launcher editor dialog (the same which you
> > get by clicking on Create Launcher on the Desktop right click menu).
> > Screenshot of the editor dialog is at
> > http://sayamindu.randomink.org/soc/images/lockdown_mockup2.png
> > When used from Sabayon, when the mandatory flag is turned on
> > (indicated by the lock icon), the desktop file will be stored in the
> > directory specified by the profile user's /etc/nautilus/globals gconf
> > key, and when the lock is open, the desktop file will be simply added
> > to the profile users desktop only (so that the user on whom the
> > profile is applied will be able to delete the launcher if required).
>
> Suggestion for additional feature :
>
> Ability to lock-down icons to a position .
>
Yes - that does seem to be a nice idea. I'll try to implement this,
but let me put the basic infrastructure in place first.
> >
> > Federico tells me that KDE already has a system for defining global
> > Desktop items - does anyone know where I can find more info on this
> > (and figure out if we can share the same mechanism / file paths / etc)
> > ?
> >
> > Comments/suggestions/brickbats would be highly appreciated :)
>
> Let me know, when testers are required :)
Sure :-)
>
>
> Reference :
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=331460
>
Great - thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Sayamindu
--
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
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