User Admin - Gui

[patrick013]

Looked in the Debian repo for a User Admin Gui.   I feel like
a chicken punching in terminal commands for this.

Any package(s)  I missed.

THX

Patrick

[djohnston]

As far as I know, usermode is the only GUI for dealing with user properties, and you can't do much using it. Debian needs some kind of Control Center to be on a par with Mandy/Mageia and Suse.

The AntiX people wrote a bash script for dealing with user management tasks. I still have a copy of it. It can be adapted to your needs if I know what you are trying to accomplish. It was part of the Openbox Control Center I adapted to one of Melodie's respins a while back. What DE are you using?

The CLI commands for dealing with user-related management are adduser, deluser, useradd, userdel and usermod.

[Taco.22]

But seriously (!!) it might be a good idea to revisit the Openbox Control Center again.  @djohnston - I tried your link in the old forum but it errored out.  Could you post it again so we can have another look at it? 


EDIT - installing gnome-system-tools (5mb download and 13mb installed) gives the "Users and Groups" application.  Not sure what else got installed because I have installed a number of other things as well!!  Anyway, there might be a way of refining it down and adding some other things.

[melodie]

I would love us to have an Openbox Control Center! When I see the bunch of entries in the Preferences menus, it seems to me all is needed, and at same time it looks very crowded.

[patrick013]

EDIT - installing gnome-system-tools (5mb download and 13mb installed) gives the "Users and Groups" application. 

On my Debian-LXDE it wanted a 100MB download and over 300MB finished
size, way too big.

[patrick013]

The AntiX people wrote a bash script for dealing with user management tasks. I still have a copy of it. It can be adapted to your needs if I know what you are trying to accomplish.

Hi DJ,

I'm using Debian-LXDE and Debian-Scorpio both testing.    The PCL-LXDE
has a User Admin GUI on the menu.   That's the package I was looking for.
Quite easy to do with that GUI.

thanks for the response.

patrick

[Taco.22]

On my Debian-LXDE it wanted a 100MB download and over 300MB finished
size, way too big.

Regarding gnome-system-tools I used apt-get with --no-install-recommends, otherwise it wanted to pull in Gnome Control Center - BIG!  In a terminal just enter "apt-get install --no-install-recommends gnome-system-tools" and it should be just a small download.  That gives you the "Users and Groups" entry in Preferences. 
I am currently doing an update on Villagebox on the test rig and will then try out a couple of these package installs again in a controlled environment.  Currently I'm just hacking up my main system    I have also got hold of both the antixcc.py and the .deb packages.  Looks like a lot of hacking needed to get it to work with our configuration - OB and sakura/xterm.  The .deb won't install due to dependency issues (terminal, editor etc) but the .py can be made to run with the addition of gtkdialog.  All heading too much in the gtk direction I fear - I wonder how it will fit in with gtk3 down the track.  Somebody started a Debian-Control-Center in python a few years back but it died on the vine and all links are dead - pity.

[djohnston]

But seriously (!!) it might be a good idea to revisit the Openbox Control Center again.  @djohnston - I tried your link in the old forum but it errored out.  Could you post it again so we can have another look at it? 

Started running low on Dropbox space and had to dump some things. I'll get it sorted out. I'm working on the control center now.

I'm using Debian-LXDE and Debian-Scorpio both testing.    The PCL-LXDE
has a User Admin GUI on the menu.   That's the package I was looking for.
Quite easy to do with that GUI.

I first installed this on Melodie's antiX respin. Had a helluva time with antiX repos and signing key. Dave's server got hacked by some guy claiming to be part of anonymous. Anyway, I've got all the pieces collected and I'm porting it to DebLXDE. The original looks like this:

[Taco.22]

Finally got a clean and updated VillageBox!  I then did "apt-get install --no-recommends gnome-system-tools" which downloaded about 7mb that occupied 17mb of disk.  In the Preferences section of the root menu four new entries appeared -

• Network
• Services
• Time and Date
• Users and Groups

"Network" allows configuration of your DNS and other things; "Services" allows to turn on or off system services as you wish; "Time and Date" allows you to change your time zone and time keeping method; and "Users and Groups" allows you to add or delete users and/or groups.

Combined with these are other installed GUI tools for adjusting your system settings -

• Wicd - network management
• Gigolo - LAN networking
• Gparted - partition management
• Htop - system processes
• Hardinfo - system and hardware tool
• LXappearance - gtk2 theme and icon handler
• Obconf - Openbox themes, appearance and layout
• Thunar-volman settings - sets parameters for all external devices
• LXrandr - monitor settings
• Tint2conf - configure tint2 panel
• Keeptalking - language and locale

All-in-all that covers a fair amount.  I guess it might be nice to combine all of it under one umbrella - either as a "control-center" or a single category.  If the later then using the root menu would be the easiest method as it doesn't mean futzing around with all the .desktop files.

Just as an aside, I will post the updated VillageBox soon - it has all the software listed above plus Geany has been replaced with Juffed - much faster.  I just need to establish if extra firmware for wireless internet needs to be added.

[patrick013]

Finally got a clean and updated VillageBox!  I then did "apt-get install --no-recommends gnome-system-tools" which downloaded about 7mb that occupied 17mb of disk. 

Took about 19 MB of space.    Even uses a GTK 3 theme.

The userdrake rpm at PCL should be adequate for a little Openbox if made into
a deb package.    Just for User Admin.    gnome-system-tools for a big OpenBox
then.

thanks for the response.

patrick

[djohnston]

There's a slight problem with users-admin, the Users section of gnome-system-tools. It will be a problem for anyone with a screen less than 864 vertical pixels. I've tried this on OBubuntu, Bento2 and DebWeb. The users-admin window will open just fine, and all sections of the window are accessible. The problem occurs when you select a user and click the Advanced Settings button. Here's a screenshot from a 1024x768 screen.



As you can see, there are no Cancel or OK buttons. The "Change Advanced User Settings" window can be resized horizontally, but not vertically. It's the vertical size that's the problem. In order to get to those buttons, I had to increase the screen size to 1152x864. I was then able to access them.



Those screenshots are from Bento2. So, I tried running the program as user root.

Code: [Sélectionner]

darrel@Bento:~$ sudo su
[sudo] password for darrel:
root@Bento:/home/darrel# users-admin &
[1] 3499
root@Bento:/home/darrel#
(users-admin:3499): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: gtk-widgets-img.css:18:14: Theming engine 'unico' not found

(users-admin:3499): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: gtk-widgets-img.css:23:14: Theming engine 'unico' not found

(users-admin:3499): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: gtk-widgets.css:248:14: Theming engine 'unico' not found

(users-admin:3499): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: gtk-widgets.css:366:14: Theming engine 'unico' not found
^C
root@Bento:/home/darrel# killall users-admin
[1]+  Terminated              users-admin
root@Bento:/home/darrel#
The users-admin window comes up as ghosted and the program will not start. I had to issue a killall command to kill the process. The results are the same on OBubuntu. Both Bento2 and OBubuntu already have the gnome-system-tools package installed.

I installed gnome-system-tools with the --no-install-recommends switch on DebWeb. I then ran the users-admin program from the menu entry. Same deal. The "Change Advanced User Settings" window cannot be resized vertically. I tried running it from a terminal as root using gksu -u root users-admin. Again, the window came up ghosted and the program would not start. And, again, I had to issue a killall users-admin command to close the window.

[Taco.22]

Bugger - all seemed too easy!!  This bug report doesn't give a lot of hope either.  Obviously ya'll just gonna have to get bigger screens 

[patrick013]

@dj

Any chance the userdrake program can fit in a deb package ?

It's got a nice boxy screen.

thanks,

patrick

[Taco.22]

I had a look at the config files for gnome-system-tools, particularly UI for Advanced Users Settings.  I couldn't work out a way of getting the overall default size to change, but I did manage to change the layout of the dialog box.

I edited the line 2627 in the file /usr/share/gnome-system-tools/ui/users.ui - changed "vertical" to "horizontal".  What this did was to move the "Cancel" and "OK" buttons from the bottom to the side.  This means it will work on almost any sized screen - I will leave this as the default setting in VillageBox.  See screenshot below.

[djohnston]

I edited the line 2627 in the file /usr/share/gnome-system-tools/ui/users.ui - changed "vertical" to "horizontal".  What this did was to move the "Cancel" and "OK" buttons from the bottom to the side.  This means it will work on almost any sized screen - I will leave this as the default setting in VillageBox.

Line 2627! Whoah, Nellie, that's a lotta readin'! That's a good solution. Kudos!

I actually installed Linux Mint's Debian edition Control Center. With the dependencies, the install worked out to about 28MB. However, it was written and compiled for the MATE desktop. It actually worked, although what it was showing were LXDE and Openbox tools already available from the menus. Well, I'm still working on the last section of a hobbled together control center.