[292] in athena10
Re: Popular locker software
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Jul 2 11:54:15 2008
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Alex T Prengel <alexp@mit.edu>
Cc: jdreed@mit.edu, athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200807012131.m61LVdUi022877@dit.mit.edu>
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Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:53:28 -0400
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On Tue, 2008-07-01 at 17:31 -0400, Alex T Prengel wrote:
> Some additional apps that are widely used, and probably good
> candidates for inclusion in the new submenu: Acrobat Reader, DrScheme,
> Meep, gnuplot, Eclipse, Gaussian, Applixware.
acroread, applixware, and tecplot are easy since they have existing menu
items under the 9.4 panel.
gnuplot we can just install locally from the Ubuntu package repository.
DrScheme and Meep don't have menu items but seem straightforward enough;
I just need to check when I'm in W92 today that they are GUI programs.
Gaussian looks a bit more complicated; it has no existing menu item and
the README.Athena instructions say to run it via setup. (Hmm, setup
isn't supported in the bash dotfiles. That's going to be an issue in
the coming year.)
Eclipse has an Ubuntu package, and would be much faster to run from
local disk, but the Debian/Ubuntu integration isn't as flawless as I
would like. If the locker integration is substantially more useful for
some reason (widely used plugins, for instance) then it might make sense
to add a locker menu item; otherwise we should probably just install it
locally.
> I would definitely include the "Software Information" "list of
> available software" and "what's new" entries so users can at least
> easily get to the full list of what's out there (these could also
> be preset custom browser bookmarks).
I'll look into this; it's slightly more complicated than just plunking
in a .desktop file but I believe it's doable.
> One thing users may miss more is the whole courseware group; I just
> don't know how much it matters though- you may want to run this by Jim
> Cain (jrcain) and Molly Ruggles (ruggles) in DUE.
There haven't been any 9.4 panel updates since September 2005, which
makes me skeptical that we need a lot of this machinery.
> About "Native PDF reader"- does this mean acroread, or some other Open
> Source pdf viewer? I have a feeling most users will prefer to use
> acroread.
It's called evince. It's fast, it has good usability in my experience,
I've never seen it have difficulty rendering anything, and it does
fill-in forms (though I don't think it can save them).
