(Not) Customizing Gnome

[Paul A Houle]

>
>I think the other person was asking how to remove Open Terminal in FC4.
>
>-Toshio
>  
>
    And installing an rpm isn't my favorite way of dealing with this.

    Some users may never use a terminal at all,  and they wouldn't need it.

    Some users may want "Open Terminal" to use gnome-terminal.  Other 
people like rxvt,  xterm,  uxterm or konsole.  This sort of thing should 
be possible to configure on a per-user basis.  This is even ~more~ true 
in a managed environment where you might want,  say,  to have a 'kiosk' 
user who has limited capabilities and an 'admin' user who can use the 
GUI to configure the system.  The sysadmin should be able to turn off 
user configurability on a per-account basis,  but may want some users 
that are different from others.

    Right now I've installed a program (statemenu) that grabs a 
middle-button click on the desktop:  I've got one button that opens a 
local terminal,  and three submenus for three different categories of 
remote machines that I log into.  With statemenu,  I can edit a simple 
xml file and get it the way I want in a few minutes.  If it were up to 
me,  I'd rather put those options at the top of the menu I get when I 
right-click on the background.  (Perhaps this won't bother me when if 
and when my muscle memory adjusts...)

    There are tough questions here...  I ~never~ use anything on the 
right-click menu other than "Open Terminal";  I'd be happy to remove all 
of the items there,  but that's probably bad for the ecology of the 
Desktop,  because that would trash the Nautilus UI,  which I (or a 
friend) might just want to use someday.  Putting my stuff on the middle 
button is probably the best answer,  because I get my bit of "namespace" 
I can do what I want with,  and Nautilus gets one too.  I've even got 
the left button to do something else with.

    People who want to create a kiosk mode,  on the other hand,  need 
complete control of the right-click menu.

    There's a lot of thought in the RH/Fedora desktop about superficial 
kinds of customization (visual themes,  backgrounds -- it's easy to 
change the desktop background from the right-click menu,  for example) 
but you're in bad shape if you want to change behavior.  I couldn't care 
less about changing how focus works:  I switch all the time between mac 
and windows,  linux and solaris,  so my brain adjusts to whatever I 
get:  however,  it ought to be easy to add a new menu to the panel and 
edit it with either a text configuration file,  a graphical tool or both.

    The basic idea here is that there ought to be part of the UI that's 
controlled by the 'OS' and part that's controlled by the user.  The 
'hat' button is a good answer to the problem of creating new entries 
when you install an application by rpm -- but a panel applet that lets 
me create custom menus would obiviate the need to install or write 
software to do really simple things.