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Granny computingGranny computingPosted Nov 14, 2009 16:00 UTC (Sat) by Cato (subscriber, #7643)In reply to: Granny computing by eru Parent article: New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit)
Any mouse dragging is a problem in my experience, as sometimes people drag things without realising it. GNOME is as bad as Windows in this respect (panel is easily dragged to the side of the screen where it's very hard to drag it back if there are lots of icons - no spare space withouth icons! You can lock down the GNOME panel at least - see http://library.gnome.org/admin/deployment-guide/ for this and other lockdowns.
I've also had to write a simpler version of the standard GNOME clock applet which doesn't show a calendar at all, just the date/time - this was confusing someone who would click this without realising and then not know how to hide the calendar (it would help if it was a standard window with an 'X' to close). Fortunately PyGTK makes this quite easy.
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Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 19:44 UTC (Sat) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] GNOME is as bad as Windows in this respect (panel is easily dragged to the side of the screen [...]Same thing in KDE, and yes it has caused confusion with the relatives I support... It really is a stupid misfeature no matter how one looks at it. It is not like changing the panel location is so common operation that it needs such a shortcut.
Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 22:03 UTC (Sat) by ABCD (subscriber, #53650) [Link]
>> GNOME is as bad as Windows in this respect (panel is easily dragged to
>> the side of the screen [...] > > Same thing in KDE, and yes it has caused confusion with the relatives I > support... It really is a stupid misfeature no matter how one looks at > it. It is not like changing the panel location is so common operation > that it needs such a shortcut.
And it appears that, at least in 4.3.74 (that is, current trunk), KDE4 no longer has that behavior (to move the panel to a different edge, you now have to explicitly request it).
Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 23:36 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
With recent versions of GNOME, this is not the case
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f11/es-ES/sec...
Granny computing Posted Nov 15, 2009 0:36 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
That's good - unfortunately Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has GNOME 2.22, which does have this problem until end of support in 2011, though it's replaced next year by 10.04 LTS.
Granny computing Posted Nov 15, 2009 18:17 UTC (Sun) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
Yeah, my daughter is constantly "rearranging" my desktop for me and when she moves my top panel to one of the sides (I have a widescreen monitor) all my icons are shoved together and there's NO space to move the panel back again. Serious PITA: I used to have to delete icons until I found space.
What I did was enable the "hide" buttons on the panel. Even though I never use them to hide the panel, it's handy to have that space to drag it around. It will be nice to have this harder to do by accident (although my daughter is doing it on purpose :-))
Granny computing Posted Nov 15, 2009 22:29 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
At least in GNOME, it's quite easy to lock the panels with gconf-editor - see my other post. KDE supports this in bleeding edge versions, as someone mentioned.
Granny computing Posted Nov 16, 2009 13:54 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
This seems to make the panels completely immutable: that's not what I want. I just want them to not move, but I still want to be able to move things around in the panel and add things to the panel. Maybe I missed it but I didn't see anything that allowed just the movement to be disabled.
Granny computing Posted Nov 17, 2009 9:02 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
There is a panel-movement lockdown feature in Ubuntu 8.10 onwards that is a bit easier to use, which might help: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-the-locked-top-panel... - it points to this GNOME bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309721
I believe this 'lock panel movement' feature is what you want.
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