This is the "ideas" web page for the "Gnome Panel Enhancements" project. This project has been accepted as part of Google's [http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html Summer of Code] program ; the student is ManuCornet.

This project was at first a bounty, described [http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/GnomePanelEnhancements here].

Desktop entries and sudo

Purpose

The idea here would be to know, for each menu item, whether the user needs to be sudoer (eg Synaptic) or not. If it does and the user is not sudoer, then this item does not need to be shown in the menu.

Coding

• Add a "RootRequired=yes|no|optional" field in the desktop entry spec

• Added a "user_is_sudoer" function into gnome-menus/libmenu/desktop-entry.c

• Added a few lines to the get_flags_from_key_file function (in the same *.c file) : if the "RootRequired" key has the "yes" value AND the user is not sudoer, hide the menu item

The "Add to panel" dialog

Here's what the "Add to Panel" dialog looks like :

http://www.manucornet.net/GNOME/Add_to_panel_before.png

And that's what I would like to make it look like.

http://www.manucornet.net/GNOME/Add_to_panel_after.png

This is not a real capture : I just played a little with GIMP/Photoshop. I haven't started coding at all, and I absolutely don't know what is possible and what isn't. I only wanted to give a preview, in order to start discussing before I really begin :o) Some of the entries were translated from my French version, sorry for the mistakes !

Panel sizing based on screen resolution and size