Plans for the desktop beyond Fedora 7

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 08:47 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 08:44 +0200, Robert M. Albrecht wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > some things I would love to see improved:
> 
> Thanks for jumping right into this discussion. Your contribution is very
> appreciated. Even cooler than a long list of things you would like to
> see improved would be a shorter list of things you can imagine improving
> yourself. With the new merged and more open Fedora, there is ample
> opportunity for people outside of the desktop team to contribute.
> 
> > Network related
> > 
> > - vpn and dialup integration for network manager
> 
> We are going to post our plans for NM work for Fedora 8 shortly. 
>  
> > - a gui for pairing with bluetooth devices
> > - a gui for setting up bluetooth and usb dialup devices (mobile phones)
> > for connecting to the internet
> > - a gui for setting up 3g networks (umts, ...) for internet access. This
> > could be an extension to system-config-network
> 
> Bastian already send a pointer to his Bluetooth writeup. A lot of
> this depends on how well the SoC project for Bluetooth goes.

There have been patches for BT PAN posted to gnome bugzilla for
NetworkManager that recognize the device and talk to it, we're working
through the specifics at this time.  The BT guys hadn't understood how
BT support in NM should be structured, so there was some lag during the
education period.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432774

Dan

> > 
> > - faster boot when not connected to a network; many services are
> > starting really slow, if the network is down
> > - faster boot times at all
> 
> We are also going to post our plans for startup modernization in a bit.
> 
> > Security
> > 
> > - disabling root (like ubuntu), thus forcing the user to work as a
> > non-root user
> 
> This is a really easy fix, just toggling a gdm setting. We might do this
> by default for Fedora 8.
> 
> > - some kind of backup tool, for the whole system or the users profile
> > and data
> > - Integration of clamav in Evolution and Thunderbird
> > - support for encryption of user data ( /home/...)
> 
> Some of these things should probably be discussed in the wider context
> of fedora-devel, since they are not really desktop specific.
> 
> 
> > Configuration
> > 
> > - Ubuntu has two software installation tools. One shows the complete
> > repository, the other is intented for endusers. Listed are only
> > applications, with a rating, how well it integrates into the used gui,
> > ... I think this is really cool. Many users are overwhelmed by that many
> > choices Pirut offers. Perhaps this could simply by a button in Pirut to
> > suppress libs or
> > - GUI for adding third party repositories
> > - GUI for managing raid configurations, Anacondo can to this, but only
> > at installation time. If you add a hdd after installation, you have to
> > use mdadm manually.
> 
> These sound all like good things. For improved software installation, I
> hope that bigboards application browser can make a difference there.
> 
> > GUI
> > 
> > - enable Gnomes NFS browsing (network places), in F7 only smb-browsing
> > seems to be enabled.
> > - enable more than three mouse-buttons
> > - enhancing the gui for extended keyboards
> > - a GUI for laptop-related things: laptop-mode, configuration
> > suspend2ram or suspend2disk, power-management, ...
> 
> 
> Can you be more specific what you are missing here ? 
> 
> - How do you envision the user interface to use a fourth mouse button  
>   (apart from special applications that may need the extra button) ?
> - What keyboard configuration are you missing (other than keyboard 
>   layouts that actually match your keyboard) ?
> 
>