GNOME 2 Administration Tools - Extremely Broken

Hi all,

I have set up a GNOME desktop on my test machine (latest snapshot of ports). I think it is all working in that ck-list-sessions is telling me that my session is active. I can shutdown and restart the machine and it is generally useful for day to day tasks.

However, is it just me or are pretty much all of the Administration tools (under the System menu) completely broken?

For example,
  • In Network, everything is grayed out. It gives me the choice to click the "make changes" padlock, but nothing comes up and it all remains disabled.
  • In Users and Groups the add and remove buttons do nothing when clicked, neither does the Advanced Settings. The only thing that does anything is the Enable Account (next to an orange label permanently telling me that my account is disabled). The whole application then crashes when I begin typing in my password in the new window that appears (who knows what it might have done to my user account?).
  • The Software Update doesn't work but I guess it doesn't really fit in well with the design of FreeBSD's packages/ports system.
These are just three examples, but not one application in that menu works fully. Many of the applications in Preferences are quite iffy and broken too.

So my question is, since they don't work, why are they actually included in x11/gnome2? It would seem a lot cleaner if their menu entries at least were removed from the default install of GNOME. Their functionality can easily be achieved using other tools or via the commandline so having no application there is surely better than a broken one, especially if no-one has time to fix them.

Since they are still here, perhaps they are working for other people? Do the maintainers know how broken they are? Does anyone here recall these tools ever working? Perhaps they have just become broken over time.

Other than the admin tools, the rest of the desktop is working very nicely (such as SMB and FTP mounting).

What do you guys think?
 
kpedersen said:
Hi all,

I have set up a GNOME desktop on my test machine (latest snapshot of ports). I think it is all working in that ck-list-sessions is telling me that my session is active. I can shutdown and restart the machine and it is generally useful for day to day tasks.

However, is it just me or are pretty much all of the Administration tools (under the System menu) completely broken?

For example,
  • In Network, everything is grayed out. It gives me the choice to click the "make changes" padlock, but nothing comes up and it all remains disabled.
  • In Users and Groups the add and remove buttons do nothing when clicked, neither does the Advanced Settings. The only thing that does anything is the Enable Account (next to an orange label permanently telling me that my account is disabled). The whole application then crashes when I begin typing in my password in the new window that appears (who knows what it might have done to my user account?).
  • The Software Update doesn't work but I guess it doesn't really fit in well with the design of FreeBSD's packages/ports system.
These are just three examples, but not one application in that menu works fully. Many of the applications in Preferences are quite iffy and broken too.

So my question is, since they don't work, why are they actually included in x11/gnome2? It would seem a lot cleaner if their menu entries at least were removed from the default install of GNOME. Their functionality can easily be achieved using other tools or via the commandline so having no application there is surely better than a broken one, especially if no-one has time to fix them.

Since they are still here, perhaps they are working for other people? Do the maintainers know how broken they are? Does anyone here recall these tools ever working? Perhaps they have just become broken over time.

Other than the admin tools, the rest of the desktop is working very nicely (such as SMB and FTP mounting).

What do you guys think?

GNOME2 is dead.
 
kpedersen said:
So my question is, since they don't work, why are they actually included in x11/gnome2? It would seem a lot cleaner if their menu entries at least were removed from the default install of GNOME.
Install x11/gnome2-lite instead. It doesn't contain as much crap as the "full" gnome2 port does while still providing a functional GNOME desktop. All the other stuff can be added simply by installing their port.
 
It's weird that nowadays someone wants to use a DE/WM which is partially broken, unless you want to fix all the messes that are currently implemented on it. So I agree completely to maintain GNOME 2 until someone can begin to change the irregular situation. It seems to me that this possibility has been abandoned :\
 
I guess the broken tools were included by the port maintainers with a hope they could be fixed someday when the upstream developers start to think about portability outside Linux. Those hopes turned out to be false as we have seen.
 
I suppose that you are aware about the development call to volunteers for FreeBSD GNOME, but otherwise, you should take a look here: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Gnome#Volunteers.

Currently, there aren't any volunteer contributions published in the wiki. Hopefully, someone can change it :)
 
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