What's New For Administrators

GNOME 2.12 has new features to make life easier for system administrators, including users who manage their own computers.

2.1. Improvements for Sabayon

As part of the work to support the Sabayon user profile manager, GNOME startup reads and touches fewer settings. Besides small performance gains, this means that GNOME 2.12 is easier to administer than ever, particularly in combination with Sabayon, which while not officially part of GNOME, makes setting up user profiles for GNOME very easy.

2.2. Menu Editor

GNOME's Applications menu now uses the freedesktop menu specification, so applications can be installed easily regardless of the desktop environment used. GNOME 2.12 has a simple tool for editing the menu and, because the infrastructure is standards compliant, other 3rd-party tools are becoming available.

Figure 16The Menu Editor

2.3. System Tools

The system tools allow you to configure your system clock and your network connection, as well as manage the users and groups on your system. At present, these system tools are most appropriate for single computers rather than large networks of computers.

GNOME 2.12 provides a new Services Administration tool, which allows you to choose which services will be started when the computer starts.

Figure 17The Services Administration tool

2.4. Log Viewer

The GNOME log viewer makes investigation easier by showing all logs in one tabbed window and allowing you to browse logs in a calendar. The new version navigator also helps when viewing archived logs.

Figure 18The Log Viewer