I've been playing w/ Debian 3.0 lately for some low end machines I have.
One thing that I noticed (again) that is really nice about the way Debian
does things is the menu system. For those not familiar w/ Debian, it
maintains a consistent menu 'hierarchy', for lack of a better term, so
that the menus will be pretty much the same in every windowmanager on the
machine. It also automatically updates the menu entries when new
software is added.
As an example, I had a bare-bones X-Windows system installed, did an
apt-get install of WindowMaker, then once I was in WindowMaker, I
realized that I only had xterm. Just for personal taste, I prefer rxvt,
given the choice. So I opened an xterm, su'd to root, did an apt-get
install of rxvt, and a few minutes later (remember, slow system here),
the menu hierarchy looked like this: (from a right click in WindowMaker)
Apps
Games
Help
Screen
Windowmanagers
Workspace
XShells --> Rxvt
Xterm
Xterm (Unicode)
With rxvt being automagically added. To test that it would actually be
added to all windowmanagers, I exited from X, edited my .xinitrc to start
XFCE instead, did a startx, and now from a right-click in XFCE,
New Window
User Menu ---> User Menu
Run Program Edit Menu
Arrange Icons Debian ---> Apps
Iconify All GNOME Games
Refresh KDE Screen
Shuffle Up Windowmanagers
Shuffle Down Workspace
Settings XShells ---> Rxvt
Quit
Xterm
Xterm (Unicode)
Right now I'm starting to look around and see if there is some port of
this available. If anyone knows of one, please let me know.
I for one would like to see something like this for at least the
applications on the RedHat install CDs, if not more. Just figure it'd be
easier (for RedHat) to make this work consistently w/ at least the
'factory' packages. The menu system from what I gather, is somewhat
configurable, so you can make the different menu titles what you want,
and so you can control how many entries in a sub-menu, so that if you
have something like 20 different editors installed, they wouldn't all
have to be lumped under 'Apps --> Editors'. Instead you could have a
'Apps --> Editors --> Novice' or 'Apps --> Editors --> Advanced'.
Obviously, there has to be away to turn it off, so that if an
administrator installs a test version of a program, it doesn't show up on
everybody's desktop menu, especially if it doesn't work ;)
So, what do y'all think?
Monte
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