! roman@athena.mit.edu

Here are some comments on installing and using LG:

1. Installation: the script requires root permitions (to write to
/etc); in the networked environment local root permitions usually are
not valid on a remote directory. If the software is being installed on
a file server, the script won't work. I had to split it into three
parts: 
o install the binary and libs and fonts(fonts dont go to the standard
	path)
o install the config file in /etc (this one as root)
o add LG font directory to the standard path before running LG

2. Using LG:

In general I am very impressed. It's a great piece of software.
The Mac-like ideas have been very nicely implemented in Unix.
The performance is usually very good.

Here are  some problems and suggestions:

1. No way to set the (initial) content of the desktop panel on a
system  wide basis.

2. The desktop icons disappear during network down time. The user has
to rebuild the desktop. The icons should reappear when the net comes up.
Nice solution would be to grey out the icons instead of removing them.
I realize that there may be some semantic problems here.

3. When modifying the LG_database it would be nice to reload it on the
fly, without having to exit LG and start it again.

4. This may be difficult, but it would be nice to have per user
databases. (if possible rules, but at least actions)

5. It would be nice to add actions interactively.

6. The new afs network file system is permanently mounted on /afs.
It contains references to all afs systems in the country. 
Because of that it's impossible to create read only database.
Starting from root would make references to /afs and this would take
forever. It should be possible to build the read only database
piece by piece, by specifying top directories of different file
systems that are to be added to the database.

7. xterm and other programs shouldn't be started with /bin as the
current working directory (it should be $HOME instead).

8. Core dumps when user double-clicks on an empty text file.

9. Hangs when a remote file system cannot be mounted.

10. It would be very nice if LG provided stdin/stdout/stderr for
the programs. Many X programs need stderr, many simple non-X programs
require a very primitive terminal type. Starting xterm for those
programs is slow and ugly. At least stderr and stdout.

11. Double clicking on text files is nice, but starting xterm/vi or
emacs each time is a pain. One way to solve it is to use emacsclient
as the editor. You have to start emacs first and then emacsclient is
called on each double click, connecting to the running emacs.
It works fine, except when you forget to start emacs, or run
emacs-server function in the emacs. It would be nice if LG
provided some support for this. (e.g. start emacs for the first
double-click and emacsclient from then on). Text editing is one of the
most frequent activities, and it's important to make it as convinient
as possible).