Ubuntu
gnome-system-tools package

[services-admin] Services' description not quite informative

Bug #89901 reported by Vassilis Pandis
8
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gnome-system-tools (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Wishlist
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

Binary package hint: gnome-system-tools

I'm currently runing Feisty. services-admin is a way to provide a user friendly service administration, but suffers (in my humble and unimportant opinion) from the fact that the descriptions of the services are not quite clear.

For instance:

* I've got two "Power Management" entries, one for acpid and one for apmd. Labelling them as "power management" is not very useful if you've got two entries under the same label without at least a short description
of what they are and how one differs from the other.

* "Printer service": Again two entries, one for cupsys and another for hplip, without a description.

Actions Scheduler (anacron, atd) and "Computer activity logger" also suffer the same fate.

It would be also useful to provide guidelines as to when a service is needed. For instance I do not have hdparm enabled, so I could think that "Oh, my hard disk is not tuned" or "I've got Audio Settings Management disabled but my sound still works".

Revision history for this message
Niels Abspoel (aboe) wrote :

I concur, when I open services-admin, the description are equal and vague.

also if you open help, it doesn't list anything about the services only how to turn
them on or off.

Changed in gnome-system-tools:
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Thank you for your bug

Changed in gnome-system-tools:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
Revision history for this message
Roman Polach (rpolach) wrote :

The service settings dialog is most confusing part of default Ubuntu desktop IMHO.
Users really needs to know what happens if they disable e.g. hotkey-setup or enable alsa-utils.
Users should get answer to question "When I want to use my disks safe and on maximum performance,
should I have hdparm service enabled or disabled?" right from this dialog.

Description of services enabled by default should have included information
"If you disable this service, features like ......... would not be accessible."
and optionally "Never disable this service if you really do not know what you are doing."
or "This service is essential to applications like ........"

Description of services disabled by default should have included information like
"In cases you want to play with ........ do enable this service.." and optionally
"You don't need this service in most cases."

The one line information could be not enough, so multi-line description should be considered.

Actually it is hard to find any information e.g. what happens when I enable alsa-utils:
Description unavailable. Help does not helped. Even if you try google out what is it for, you
wouldn't be probably satisfied. Forum threads like http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89491
also don't give the answer.

May be this bug report should be converted to new blueprint?
It would be nice to have it in Hardy LTS.

Revision history for this message
Tobias C. Rittweiler (tcr) wrote :

This bug has still not been addressed (9.04), and I fully concur with
the previous posters.

It would help already -- and this is hopefully only a small bit of
_technical_ rather than social work -- is if the "Services" entries
were linked to packages.

So you can get at information about the package, its description,
and, in particular, to get at a link to the official website where one
can obtain more information.

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