Somebody told me once that if you buy a medium-price hi-fi amplifier, it will come with tone controls, graphic equalisers, and no end of knobs and dials on the front so you can adjust it to exactly the sound you want, but if you buy a really expensive one it will just have a power switch and a volume control and get everything else right without having to be told.
It's a laudable goal, certainly; but currently I'm still smarting from the perceived downgrade of the transition from GNOME 1 to GNOME 2. Debian actually put up a warning box when I upgraded from woody to sarge, saying something along the lines of "Unfortunately Debian was unable to automatically convert your GNOME 1 configuration to GNOME 2, because GNOME 2 doesn't have most of GNOME 1's features".
For example, GNOME 1 let me put an icon in my taskbar (er, gnome-panel) which popped up a menu just like the GNOME start menu, but filled with menu items of my own choice; I filled it with my favourite shortcuts, mostly PuTTYs which connected to one or another of my usual SSH servers. Very useful. Whereas GNOME 2, as far as I've been able to tell, will only let me have a "Drawer" filled with "Custom Application Launchers", which (a) has a subtly different UI from the GNOME start menu and other menu-type things (you have to click to open the Drawer and click again to close it, rather than it automatically going away once you select something from it), and (b) is apparently unwilling to put names beside the icons of the things in the Drawer, presumably on the basis that they're akin to the icon-only launchers in the taskbar itself rather than to icon-plus-text menu items. I can ask for a "Custom Menu Bar" in my taskbar, but the contents of that menu bar appears to be dictated by Debian, and none of the right-click menus seems to let me edit it or point it at a menu file in my own filespace or anything. I'm thoroughly unconvinced that this is a step forward; what was wrong with GNOME 1's willingness to let users make their own menus?
(I realise you might very well be totally the wrong person to receive that rant. Sorry.)
You can add new entries to the existing menus using smeg (or alacarte as it's now called) but there's no standard way of adding a whole new menu. (Just verified on #gnome-hackers.) I suppose it was lost in the rewrite and nobody thought it was useful enough to add in again.
This makes me think that someone should write a small applet to do this, and since I know it would be very easy in Python, perhaps that person is me. I need to think of a good name for it, though.
My Debian system appears to have no file containing either smeg or alacarte in the name, and "apt-cache search" turns up no uninstalled package under either name either. Where should I be looking?
packages.debian.org says (http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?searchon=names&version=all&exact=1&keywords=alacarte) it's currently only in etch and sid, surprisingly. You can find it under "alacarte" (http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/alacarte/) on cvs.gnome.org if you want to check it out yourself.
I'd be happy to write a general-purpose extra menu. If you're only looking for an SSH menu, this (http://www.mclean.net.nz/ruby/sshmenu/) might do just what you want, though.
Ah, thanks. (First time I've seen Debian sarge be noticeably out of date, in fact. When I was running woody I wouldn't have hesitated to look in unstable before doing anything else at all!)
The menu I want isn't actually quite composed of nothing but SSH entries – a notable exception is the slightly more complex script that connects to Monochrome. I'd adapt the applet you link to there, only I can hardly understand a word of it. (Though that may be just because I speak neither GNOME nor Ruby :-)
Funny, I have exactly the opposite problem with drawers and auto-closing. I have a drawer full of terminal+ssh launchers, and can't figure out how to get it to stay open. So to launch multiple sessions, which is my usual requirement, I need to open drawer, select session, re-open drawer, lather, rinse and repeat.
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This is what I want for GNOME over KDE!
For example, GNOME 1 let me put an icon in my taskbar (er,
gnome-panel) which popped up a menu just like the GNOME start menu, but filled with menu items of my own choice; I filled it with my favourite shortcuts, mostly PuTTYs which connected to one or another of my usual SSH servers. Very useful. Whereas GNOME 2, as far as I've been able to tell, will only let me have a "Drawer" filled with "Custom Application Launchers", which (a) has a subtly different UI from the GNOME start menu and other menu-type things (you have to click to open the Drawer and click again to close it, rather than it automatically going away once you select something from it), and (b) is apparently unwilling to put names beside the icons of the things in the Drawer, presumably on the basis that they're akin to the icon-only launchers in the taskbar itself rather than to icon-plus-text menu items. I can ask for a "Custom Menu Bar" in my taskbar, but the contents of that menu bar appears to be dictated by Debian, and none of the right-click menus seems to let me edit it or point it at a menu file in my own filespace or anything. I'm thoroughly unconvinced that this is a step forward; what was wrong with GNOME 1's willingness to let users make their own menus?(I realise you might very well be totally the wrong person to receive that rant. Sorry.)
This makes me think that someone should write a small applet to do this, and since I know it would be very easy in Python, perhaps that person is me. I need to think of a good name for it, though.
smegoralacartein the name, and "apt-cache search" turns up no uninstalled package under either name either. Where should I be looking?I'd love an applet that did that!
I'd be happy to write a general-purpose extra menu. If you're only looking for an SSH menu, this (http://www.mclean.net.nz/ruby/sshmenu/) might do just what you want, though.
The menu I want isn't actually quite composed of nothing but SSH entries – a notable exception is the slightly more complex script that connects to Monochrome. I'd adapt the applet you link to there, only I can hardly understand a word of it. (Though that may be just because I speak neither GNOME nor Ruby :-)
sshlaunchers, and can't figure out how to get it to stay open. So to launch multiple sessions, which is my usual requirement, I need to open drawer, select session, re-open drawer, lather, rinse and repeat.