Yesterday I talked about how I made a day-longexcursion into the depths of Gnome, trying to chase down a problem wewere having customizing Gnome's main menu, when I could have skippedmost of the work by doing some Googling first. I thought it would beinterested to give some more detail about the problem and the processI followed in finding it.

The problem was that we want a submenu for our local applications toappear on the default main applications menu. I had everything elsenecessary (such

It's interesting how easily I can use Google to embarrass myself.

Last week, I spent most of an entire day trying to work out how to adda submenu to the default main application menu in the Gnome FedoraCore 4 configuration. (Not building the submenu itself; we had alreadydone that for a previous Red Hat release. Just figuring out how to getit to appear, so that all the students who use the defaultconfiguration would see our local application menu.)

I was all set to write

I feel that people writing programs for system administration shouldbe forced to make a choice: are you writing a tool or a frontend?'Both' is not a good answer, because nine times out of ten that leadsto a program that does neither very well and irritates everyone,leading to things like Friday's entry on why apt-get is notmy favorite program.

A system administration tool is is a reusable building block, part ofthe larger system. It's designed to be easily used by